


Shark Kibble: The Datapad of Student ISBTECH 815761

by Kahara_the_Ghostly_Galoomp



Series: Unquiet Waters [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: New Republic Era - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming of age situation all kriffed up by evil relatives and also galactic crises, Excessive Worldbuilding with Obscure EU Trivia, Gen, It’s Not a Family Reunion If Nobody Loses a Limb, Mostly OC's and obscure canon characters, Mysterious Things Happening, OC-centric, Other, POV First Person (diary), Past Character Death, Warnings May Change, Yes it's the wannabe Empire (Second Imperium)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 63,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4009465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahara_the_Ghostly_Galoomp/pseuds/Kahara_the_Ghostly_Galoomp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a diary told from the viewpoint of Lydia Shelvay, a young woman from one of the most obscure Outer Rim backwaters of the Imperial Remnant. She seeks to join the Second Imperium as a technician for their growing intelligence organization, but her journey to the last holdouts of the Empire leads to some uncomfortable discoveries.</p>
<p>Re-posted from TFN. On temporary hiatus as of May 2015 so that I can work on a prequel in the same 'verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Looking Forward to the Sharks (Month 1, Day 15)

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the Unquiet Waters universe (my Star Wars: Legends based fanfic series; this is set in a mostly EU-canon universe but with some mostly-minor retcons here and there.)
> 
> Warnings: For the most part, I think this story is pretty typical of the Star Wars universe in terms of warnings, but here are some things that readers might possibly want to be aware of. If you have any questions about the content based on these or just in general, let me know and I will do my scatterbrained best to help provide that information. 
> 
> \- Mentions of relationship with elements of manipulation/brainwashing and also possible Stockholm Syndrome (same relationship) 
> 
> \- Creepy human-eating monsters and ghosts (are one and the same) 
> 
> -Needles 
> 
> -Discussion of torture 
> 
> -Amputation injury 
> 
> \- Situation involving fears of sexual assault (which doesn't happen) 
> 
>  
> 
> Originally started as a challenge story for the Dear Diary Challenge in the Resource Forum on TFN. No longer in the competition (which is long over), but the story has taken on a life of it's own. 
> 
> I'm working on reference pages for this 'verse and will try to remember and post them here when/if they're completed.
> 
> The calendar system Lydia uses for her entries is based on that of the Galactic Empire, which I am assuming members of the Imperial Remnant continued to use. Since there don't seem to be any sources on exactly how dates were written by the Imperials, I've made it up. Year dates are given in BE (Before Empire) and AE (after the formation of the Empire.) 41 AE is equivalent to 22 years after the Battle of Yavin.

This datapad belongs to Lydia Shelvay, soon to be Student ISBTECH 815761 at the University of Karkaryss. If found, please return to the lost and found at the students’ quarters on campus. Or not, since I’m not much of a diary person.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
****

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 15**  
  
After searching through the small pack full of random odds and ends I threw together at 4:00 in the morning, I found this half-busted old datapad and decided to start a journal. I can’t say there was any planning behind bringing this thing along, given that I packed all the essentials yesterday morning. The only real reason for gathering random junk was that I couldn’t sleep and needed something to do. There was little point in trying to go back to sleep, since the kelele birds and squarriks were making a prize-winning racket outside the window. It’s like they knew this was their last chance to inflict insomnia on me. I spent hours laying awake and listening to the early morning creatures crow, shriek, and warble away, knowing that I was going to miss even this.  
  
Shullia has been my homeworld since I was a baby, though I was born on the SSD _Imperishable_. Long story short, having the Rebellion blow up a vital chunk of the government that one worked for tends to alter one’s plans for maternity leave. Mum was lucky enough to have a true friend in Captain Tancred, who made sure that she and I were safely deposited planetside in an Imperial-friendly system. Since she worked for the ISB before everything went to the Ninth Circle in a handbasket, it wasn’t exactly possible for her to settle down in New Republic territory with a brand-new kid. Elena Shelvay was not as notorious of a name as Ysanne Isard, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have enemies among the Rebels.  
  
I don’t know if she missed being near the center of civilization while we were living out here. There was always work for her to do, since Shullia is pretty much in the middle of one of the last scattered Outer Rim territories that are still Imperial. She was an agent of all trades, dealing with everything from arranging food production contracts with the Deep Core to keeping the New Republic’s nose out of classified business (not that there’s ever been a lot of that on Shullia.) Maybe it wasn’t what she always wanted out of life, and it’s kind of strange to think about that, but I know she loved this planet.  
  
She’d take me out on long walks through the blue-green fields of nisu grain and into the wooded hill country nearby. Out there, she always seemed different. Not as though she were another person, but more relaxed and happy. Where she was always vigilant and diplomatic around other people, when we were out among the trees that constant mask of perfection disappeared. She smiled more and laughed like most people laugh, embarrassing unpredictable snorts and all. You’d never catch her sounding like that in public, where she was always pleasant but cool and controlled.  
  
Any time I had a question about the living things of the fields and forests, she had some kind of an answer. Mum grew up on Galtea, which is a long way from Shullia, but it was a farm world and she learned all about the plants and animals that lived there. She was the one who showed me how to find slitherbugs and other creepy-crawlies under rocks and rotting logs (a choice she may have come to regret a few times, since it took a while for me to learn to leave things where I found them.) Of course, she never let me forget the time I discovered the drakemoths when I was six years old. In my defense, they’re not exactly your standard backyard bugs. Anything that looks that much like a miniature gundark with wings is a bit startling to find inside a flower.  
  
It wasn’t so much my being surprised by a weird-looking creature, or even my letting out an undignified yelp, but the fact that I managed to backpedal through a patch of slimy marshweeds and land in the mud among a colony of frogs would be immortalized in story to visitors for years. Mum came over quickly to check on me, helping me back to my feet and picking the last few persistent frogs out of my hair. After the usual litany of “are you hurt” and so on, she guided me over to a mossy rock and sat beside me. I was undoubtedly a tearstreaked, runny-nosed mess by this point. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders and waited. Even if Mum did tell other parts of the story over and over, she never mentioned that bit of it.  
  
When I had calmed down, she asked me, “So, what happened there? You sounded scared, but all I could see was that you tripped and fell backward.” Though I now think she must have been a little amused at my bedraggled and be-frogged state, her inflection was as serious as if she were discussing trade routes with an ambassador.  
  
“The flower had a big bug thing in it. Like a spider and a lizard, and a butterfly, and a bee, and a… I dunno. It was weird-looking.” I traced patterns in the moss, trying to put my thoughts together.  
  
“Don’t know, not dunno, Lydia”, she said automatically. Six-year-old grammar was one of the banes of Mum’s existence back then. She leaned over to see my moss art, adding a cartoonish kelele bird to edge of the tree I’d sketched. I could tell what kind it was supposed to be, because no other bird on Shullia has such a ridiculously-long and strangely-shaped tail. “Can you show me where you found the bug?” Short stubby wings were added to the bird.  
  
I didn’t really want to see that creature again, but I nodded and led her over to a patch of yellow-orange flowers. “It was in the flower.” I chewed on my lip a little. “It kinda looked like the Molator from the story holos at the library.”  
  
“You know those give you nightmares.” She sighed the sigh of a woman who had fought a long-running, losing battle against my need to scare myself silly. “If you didn’t read those things you wouldn’t be seeing terentateks and glooths in the shrubbery.”  
  
Mum crouched down by one of the flowers, carefully brushing the petals aside with a stick. “Hmm.” It sounded like an I-told-you-so sort of “hmm.” A slight crooked smile crept onto her face. She withdrew the stick, drawing out a creature just like the one I had seen before. It crawled up and down, fluttering its green-striped wings in the late afternoon light.  
  
Having had some warning this time, I was more disgusted and intrigued than afraid. I moved closer to look at the insect. “It won’t sting you?” Suspiciously, I pointed at the creature’s wasp-like tail.  
  
“Not at all, but you have to be very careful not to touch it’s wings. They are fragile and the bug can’t fly if its wings are hurt.” She gradually tipped the insect into her hand, letting it walk off the stick and into her palm. “This is a drakemoth, Lydia. We had these on Galtea, too. Not the same exact kind, but many animals from different planets are related.”  
  
My eyes were fixed on the insect’s shimmering exoskeleton. Mum seemed totally oblivious to the creepiness of its appearance. “They look like they do because it makes the predators afraid to eat them. There’s another type of animal that looks a little bit like this, but it could actually hurt you. We called that kind a mothdrake, since it looks more like a moth or butterfly but is actually a venomous lizard. If a mothdrake stings or bites you, the wound will usually swell up and hurt for several days. Drakemoths, on the other hand, are harmless. They look like a mothdrake with an even nastier stinger, but they’re really just a moth. All they eat is nectar. They can’t bite or sting you.”  
  
With her other hand, Mum tucked a strand of golden hair back behind her ear. Her deep blue eyes took on a faraway look. “There was a story on Galtea about Flichter the Green Moth and Gath the Dragon-Lizard. Of course, Gath was nowhere near as famous of a fighter as his fire-breathing cousin Pyrrhus of the Stinking Nostrils, nor as great of a tracker and hunter as Umbra the Grayish-Brown. But he was proud and believed himself to be the most handsome and clever of all dragon-lizards. Every morning, he sharpened the scales of his spine ridge with a stone from the river and dipped his claws in muckweed to make them just the right shade of yellow-green…”  
  
I curled up as best I could beside her, my worries more or less forgotten. It wasn’t very often that Mum told the stories of her homeland, but I had always loved them. The animal characters, magicians, and forever-quarreling trees of Galtean folklore never failed to captivate my imagination. The Shullian countryside seemed to bring the stories out of her without the tension that usually accompanied mentions of her old home.  
  
By the time the afternoon was fading, I was able to hold the drakemoth in my hand without fear, marveling at the soft tickling sensation of its tiny feet on my skin. Mum and I made it back home by the riverside trail just as the last of the sunset light disappeared, and I nearly fell asleep on the couch before muddy clothing could be exchanged for dry pajamas. Even if the frogs in my hair were embarrassing, if we’re being honest, that was as close to a perfect day as I could imagine at that age.  
  
I miss her and I’m not going to stop living in the past unless I can get away from Shullia. For the last two years, I’ve been trying to go back to a “normal life.” Zain took care of me for the first few weeks, and I’ve been staying with our Grannan neighbors, the Meurics (they always have room for one more, so long as you don’t mind farm work and a plentitude of toddlers running around.) My friends are going to miss me, I know that. Going to Karkaryss is something I need to do now, while I have the chance. Having a family friend in Captain Tancred, who was able to deal with the bureaucratic mess in order to allow my attendance at the University of Karkaryss, provided the impetus for me to get moving. The university is in the Deep Core. It’s one of the few top-notch educational facilities left to what the New Republic people call the “Imperial Remnant.”  
  
If there is one thing that the invasion two years ago should have taught us, it is that we need to be able to defend our world. Shullia is located in a supposedly obscure and insignificant region bordering the Parmic sector, largely surrounded by New Republic territory. That doesn’t mean that we are safe from the many threats that are allowed to run wild on the Outer Rim, as we should have realized sooner. All it took was a pirate fleet (and not even an especially big one) to almost bring the whole Neredda system to its knees. If my mother hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t had the training from her days with the Imperial Security Bureau, we’d probably all be enslaved or dead by now. And I guess I take it personally, because there was no fleet of Star Destroyers and definitely no help from the New Republic when we came under fire. All we had was a shoddy local defense fleet and an ex-ISB agent who knew her stuff.  
  
Maybe I’m biased, but I tend to think the latter was more important in the end. Trying to fight off Vastag Slone’s pirates with a brute force attack would never have worked. It was Mum who knew how to organize a local resistance to drive back the pirates, and she was the one who led a team to infiltrate and destroy Slone’s fleet. Every time I go over these events, I keep trying to find some way, some strategy that would have placed her somewhere else and had everything turn out all right. It wouldn’t change anything now, though, and that road leads nowhere. The one thing that I can’t ignore is that the Neredda system’s victory was largely due to one person. And she’s gone, and there’s nothing left at home that doesn’t remind me of her.  
  
So I’m recording all of this on an ancient datapad in the cramped quarters of a _Sigma_ -class shuttle that has seen much better days. We’re talking about days when the Max Rebo Band was music for people under forty. The shuttle is a bit scratched-up and worn out, though it’s still spaceworthy – I hope so, anyway. I’m not sure I like recording all of my thoughts like this. It reminds me of why I’m leaving Shullia so far behind, instead of taking up farming like a sane person. Still, it’s not like there is a lot else to do here. Most of the ship has been modified to be used for cargo, so there aren’t many other passengers. The main pastimes of the last several hours have been reading, sleeping, and reading some more.  
  
Before I left home, my friend Vera told me I was going to her ultimate nightmare, a planet full of almost nothing but shark-infested waters. That isn’t exactly true. Karkaryss has a number of island mountain ranges. In the past couple of decades, its cities have been expanded to hover over the water on a combination of repulsorlifts and anchored frameworks. The Second Imperium has invested a lot of money into making it a technological center and they’ve done a decent job too, according to Captain Tancred. There are sharks, but by this point I’m looking forward to them.

 

**Notes:**

Datapad (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Datapad>)

SSD - abbreviation for Super Star Destroyer (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Star_Destroyer>)

Ninth Circle (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ninth_Circle_of_Damnation>)

Ysanne Isard (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ysanne_Isard>)

ISB - Imperial Security Bureau (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Security_Bureau>)

Shullia - non-canon planet; remote agricultural world in the Outer Rim and part of an Imperial stronghold in 22 ABY

Neredda system - non-canon solar system containing a few inhabited worlds, including Shullia and Neredda

Deep Core - galactic region (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Deep_Core>)

Molators (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Molator>), terentateks (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Terentatek>), and glooths (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Glooth>), oh my!

Note on the presence of frogs and sharks -- both have appeared elsewhere in the Star Wars: Legends EU. But I am the kind of person who thinks about this kind of thing too much, so I actually have a theory as to how that happens (see Elena's mention of creatures from different planets are related.) There has been space traffic throughout the galaxy for so long that many worlds are home to immigrated species of animals and plants. And humans, of course. ;)

Galtea (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galtea>)

The name of Karkaryss is similar to Karkaris (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Karkaris>) for a reason, though they are distant from each other in space.

Max Rebo Band (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Max_Rebo_Band>)

_Sigma_ -class shuttle (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sigma-class_shuttle>)

Second Imperium (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Imperium>)

Since her character is fairly obscure and only appears in one source, I wanted to make a note that Elena Shelvay comes from the Star Wars RPG book _Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim_ , written by Simon Smith and Eric S. Trautmann. She’s not an OC, just relatively unknown. (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Elena_Shelvay>)


	2. The Horrors of Mynocks and Pop Music (Month 1, Day 17)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 17**  
  
This is only the third day in transit and I’d be climbing the walls if the ceiling wasn’t a foot above my head. There isn’t much space to wander around on the _Draigon_. The only other person who is ever around is the shuttle pilot Captain Barrett, who seems to think that I will break the ship if I leave my quarters for more than a minute.   
  
Every morning, I sneak to the ship’s refrigeration unit and rummage for some food for the day. Passengers aren’t encouraged to bring their own meals, since there are apparently concerns over agricultural pests. Getting food from the refrigeration unit is what I am supposed to do, but Barrett doesn’t always seem to remember that. In fact, I don’t think he always recalls that there are other people on the ship. We both probably removed a few years from each other’s lives today.   
  
I was fighting my usual battle with the locking mechanism on the refrigeration unit’s door (which looked to have been rewired, possibly by an astromech droid with severe issues.) A sudden thunking noise made me spin around. I reflexively reached for my blaster — which was now absent, left in the ship’s locker upon boarding. Someone made a squeak like a puffershrill deflating. Since Barrett isn’t writing this journal, I’m blaming the sound on him. It could have been him, it really could have. He was flattened against the doorway, looking like he’d just walked into a nest of gundarks. A large metallic box lay on the floor where he’d dropped it.   
  
A flicker of recognition appeared in his eyes. He scowled and pointed at me accusingly. “You again! Sheltie.” He fluttered his arms in frustration, as if to shoo me away. “What the the Emperor’s gray and ghostly underpants are you doin’ to my ship, girl?”   
  
Blanching a little at the disrespect to the late Emperor, I was nearly at a loss for words. My mother would have had me washing my mouth out with soap over such a comment — and not with the nicer purple kind (tangy, with a slight minty aftertaste that really wasn’t so bad) but the sour yellow variety that made me wince just from smelling it. Dealing with Barrett’s paranoid suspicions over the last couple of days had begun to make me feel pretty defensive and persecuted. I crossed my arms and drew up to my full height. It would be nice if I had inherited the tall genes from either side of the family.   
  
“Captain Barrett,” I began, keeping my voice as calm and even as possible, “there are few things that I want less than to tamper with your ship.” This is very true. I fear the consequences of tangling with the insane mechanical workings of this shuttle.   
  
Barrett squinted at me, still unwilling to relent. “Don’t you mess with the workings, Sheltie. Wrong circuit goes out an’ _they_ can get in.”   
  
Oh, this is just perfect, I thought. We were hurtling through the abyss of hyperspace with this bastion of sanity in charge of keeping the shuttle in one piece. Doomed, doomed, doomed. I’d seen this holovid before.   
  
Dutifully, expecting the worst, I inquired, “They?”   
  
He shook his fist, a gleam of fanaticism lighting his eyes.   
  
Well, poodoo. Clearly, it was the beginning of the end.   
  
“The squark-chewin’ mynocks!” The exclamation was accompanied by an impressive spit-spray that I would have been just as happy to miss. “Little rust-brained creeps. They get in and they feed on everything.” He twirled around, raising his arms. Barrett was really getting into this speech. “They’ll eat the wires, the navigation system, the hyperdrive, everything! First trip I did when I was starting out, it was a luxury liner with over 400 passengers heading to Byss. Mynocks got in, chewed up the wiring for the sonics. No sonic showers for two weeks.” He halted, letting that sink in.   
  
It sounded pretty bad, I had to admit. None too fresh. However, it was a relief that Barrett was at least worried about something real. Mynocks can be a problem for spacecraft.   
  
“No sonic showers for two weeks, and then they got into the sound system. Messed it up something awful. Do you know the band The Emperor’s New Clothes?” He stared off into space with a haunted look.   
  
“Certainly, the student band played one of their songs at our graduation from secondary school.” Maybe he was finally calming down. Maybe I could break away and slink off to my quarters now.   
  
Barrett shook his head frantically. “You don’t know it that well. I. Know. Every. Line. Of. Every. Song.” He shivers. “All of their albums played constantly. Full volume. Ten days.”   
  
Poor Barrett. Now I really did feel sorry for him. Pop music can be a terrible weapon.   
  
Without warning, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “You can’t let them in! No more mynocks, Sheltie!” He shook me, looking downright panicked. I extracted myself from his hold, taking some care to hand his limbs back to him in working order. It’s a good thing that several people taught me some basic self-defense over the years. I wouldn’t have wanted to actually hurt Barrett, who now seemed more paranoid than intentionally menacing.   
  
Striving to make my voice more soothing, I said, “All I am doing here is gathering some food for the day, in keeping with the shipboard rules.” A small twinge of remaining annoyance inspired me to add, “And my surname is Shelvay. It is definitely not Sheltie, Shelly, Smelter, or Shellfish.”   
  
Barrett appeared to still be processing the fact that I had herded him away like an unruly nerf. Not my problem, but he’d been badly startled by finding me here. Better to make peace with him, if at all possible.   
  
“I’m sorry that my presence here surprised you. After I get some rations, I’ll head back to my quarters. No mynocks, I promise.” Maintaining eye contact, I did my best to look as trustworthy and non-mynock-abetting as possible. “In fact, I could get my food at the same time every day, if that makes it less surprising for you. It’s 8:45 now. If I show up at that time, it won’t be unpredictable, right?”   
  
He wrinkled his forehead, rolling that thought around. “All right,” he said, sounding doubtful. “Have a… nice day? Shelway.”   
  
Close enough, at least he was trying now. Barrett picked up his toolbox and walked away, stopping briefly by the door. “The ‘fridge key’s under the box of blue cacti.” So convenient of him to mention that after three days.   
  
And there is Captain Barrett for you. I feel accomplished for making it back to my room before letting my head hit the wall. This is going to be a long two weeks.   
  
  
**Notes** :  
  
Well, over a year after posting I happened to notice that Lydia's ponderings on the taste of soap were an accidental reference to the movie A Christmas Story. Thankfully not the same line for line! Every time I find something like this, I wonder how many others I didn't catch. After some thought, I'm just going to note it and leave it in as an homage.

Draigon (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Draigon>)

The Emperor's New Clothes (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes>)


	3. College Ads, Conspiracy Theories, and the Reasons Why Family Reunions Are a Bad Idea (Month 1, Day 19)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 19**  
  
Eight more days to go before the _Draigon_ arrives on Karkaryss. My truce with Barrett seems to be holding, which makes for one less headache. On the other hand, I’m not sure what to think of the situation with the other passengers. Regular disappearances of food from the refrigeration unit are really the only signs I have seen of other people being on the ship. Barrett and I would have to be eating seven meals a day for it to be consumed that fast. Whoever it is seems to prefer their privacy. I can’t imagine that Barrett’s grumpiness would actually intimidate someone into avoiding all contact with other people on the ship. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bit of a hermit myself, but it’s not only because of him. It’s also because these other people are so intentionally invisible that I wouldn’t have bothered to suspect they were there if not for the food vanishing. Whenever they leave their quarters, they move so quietly that I have never heard them. My attempts to say hello using the internal comm system in my quarters met with no signs of life. To be honest, it’s becoming a little unnerving. Hopefully, they’re just dedicated students catching up on last minute work.  
  
Lacking any current assignments, I’ve been working on a few projects and reading up on what I can find about the Deep Core worlds. Many of the Second Imperium’s strongholds have little information outside of basic terrain and population statistics. Even those facts are often decades out of date, particularly in the areas where hyperspace routes were affected by the destruction of Byss. Of course, the planet I’m most interested in right now is Karkaryss, my home for the next couple of years. I’m in a little more luck researching that, since they have been advertising their technological industries on Shullia. Lately, there seems to be a real push on their part to draw more students and settlers.  
  
The advertising datachip from Karkaryss University contains some impressive vid images. The basic form of the university resembles a spiny jellyfish, with spiderweb-like thin connecting lines (possibly hallways or some kind of transportation system) running between over two dozen towers. A dark mass of tangled structures drifts below the waves, looking more than slightly like slow-moving tentacles. According to the caption of one of the images, the entire thing is eight kilometers across. That makes it bigger than Turmalin, the island on Neredda where our class from school camped two years ago. It must be an impressive sight in person.  
  
Unlike most of the cities and installations developed on Karkaryss, the university is not anchored to a landmass and instead uses repulsorlifts and “advanced new technologies” (whatever those may be) to stay afloat. My guess is that the tentacle-like things help to propel it along. Every piece of the main structure has an unusual blue-green tinge. I doubt that the color comes from paint, since the Imperial-sponsored buildings on Shullia are all more or less the same shade of light gray.  
  
Although I have serious reasons for going, I have to admit that curiosity has me itching to explore and learn about the university. It has such a mysterious and complex appearance. A person could probably wander for weeks without seeing everything, though I suppose large parts of it are probably restricted. Whatever systems keep it all from sinking would have to be heavily protected. Still, from the map it looks like students are expected to visit most of the towers. Three are labeled as students’ quarters, while many of the others seem to be set aside for the classes and activities of different departments. Some of the names are obvious, including the ones that are highlighted for Tech students like myself. It’s not hard to guess what they study at the Information Networks Center or the Surveillance Technology Applications building.  
  
On the other hand, there are a couple of acronyms (CIMTPR-263 may mean something to the mapmakers, but it doesn’t to the rest of the Galaxy) and names that are vague or just plain odd. A set of four linked buildings is simply labeled the Blue Complex, with no added explanation. Another building is called the Center for the Research of Metaphysical Biology. Vera, Rhajani and Chelii grabbed onto that name the first time they saw it. We had all been making up explanations for nearly a month by the time I left home. Our favorite choices for the building’s true purpose were:  
  
1\. Drug-sniffing barracle training center. A noble social project intended to give undead feline squid-monsters a useful role in law enforcement. (It’s unclear who started this one, it just kind of happened.)  
  
2\. Containment facility for the Galaxy’s first sentient case of the hiccups. It's contagious, naturally. (That one was mine. There are few things that fill me with more rage than hiccups that won’t go away.)  
  
3\. Testing for a sprayable Jedi repellent. (Yes, please. Not only could I stop worrying about my scumrat Jedi uncle showing up some day, but maybe it would work on my Inquisitorial parental unit as well. Not that I see Inquisitor Tremayne all that often, but our few meetings have been stunning achievements in awkwardness (on my part, at least.) It would have been nice to have something that I could spritz in his face and halt the ranting. “I… don’t actually need to talk to you about my obsessive grudge against your mother’s estranged sibling.” That sounds glorious.)  
  
4\. Specialized genetic engineering project for clone troopers that can turn into space ships in every color of the rainbow. (Chelii was strongly encouraged _not_ to consume half her body weight in sugar before watching a marathon of Magic Agent Sparkledancer. Ever again. As a matter of Shullian planetary security.)  
  
5\. Droid army composed of Force-sensitive silicon-based life forms placed inside battle droids. (That was Rhajani’s idea, the rest of us take no responsibility. She gets so into her technological theories, sometimes she gets a bit carried away.)  
  
6\. The reincarnation of Garik Loran. (Chelii went through a period of severe mourning when she was nine and found out that he was long dead.)  
  
7\. Berserker Ewoks. (Vera swore up and down that the New Republic has a secret X-wing squadron composed of genetically-engineered Ewok assassins. She really shouldn’t have tried to match Chelii’s sugar consumption.)  
  
8\. All of the remaining Imperial Force adepts cooperating in an attempt to channel the spirit of Grand Admiral Thrawn, possibly through the universal power of music. (Courtesy of Meuric Chelii Enterprises: Disturbing the rest of the dead since 23 AE. Personally, I need a brain purge from the mental sound-image of my father and his coworkers singing. Some things should never happen.)  
  
9\. Time machine construction facility. (Anyone who has ever watched holos on the subject knows that this is a bad idea. We will all end up related to the Skywalkers and the universe will implode. That’s why you can’t fix your problems with time travel.)  
  
10\. Nothing. It’s all a trick to mess with the heads of incoming students. (If I had a credit for every time a new student at school on Shullia came up to me asking how to find the teleport hub, I could retire right now. I’d be bored stiff for the rest of my days, but I could do it.)  
  
The shuttle will be making its first refueling stop on Dachat today. Dachat is a Core World by location, but there are not many permanent residents. Unlike most of its neighbors, the planet’s major cities were never rebuilt after the Clone Wars. The few settlements left serve as a rest stop and refueling point for passing cargo ships. Dachat will be the last stop before we begin moving into the Deep Core regions of the Galaxy. The hyperspace routes to our destination are roundabout, consisting of a series of twisting pathways leading into the Deep Core. The journey would have been much faster before the Byss Run was destroyed. As it is, the routes the _Draigon_ will follow are the most reliable ones found since the disaster – and they are still quite mysterious, even unreliable at times.  
  
The realization of just how remote our location will be is more than a little disturbing. If something goes wrong with the shuttle, I don’t think we can count on being found. And that’s if we don’t fly through a star in the hyperlanes that wasn’t there before (entirely possible, if you believe the stories people tell about these places.) However, I’m looking forward to learning more as we travel. It’s a unique chance to see a corner of the Galaxy that few people ever bother to consider. We’re also going to be taking on more passengers on Dachat before heading onward, so maybe I’ll find some less secretive guests to talk to. I can only hope.

  
  
**Notes** :  
  
The Inquisitor Tremayne referred to is this not-so-charming individual (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Antinnis_Tremayne>), who appeared in _Galaxy Guide 9_ by Simon Smith and Eric S. Trautmann and also in the short story the _Longest Fall_ by Patricia A. Jackson. He was also an antagonist in some of the webcomics published on Hyperspace. There are references elsewhere as well. I’m pretty sure that I first found a summary of his character in one of the Star Wars character encyclopedias.  
  
The “scumrat Jedi uncle” Lydia mentions is Corwin Shelvay (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corwin_Shelvay>), who mainly appears in _Galaxy Guide 9_. He, Inquisitor Tremayne, and Elena Shelvay are among a number of interlinked characters found in the book, which I ended up buying out of curiosity based on the entries in Wookieepedia. While most of these characters haven’t gotten much attention (or any, in some cases) in the EU since the RPG book where they first appeared, they seem like interesting fodder for fan fiction.  
  
Regarding Lydia’s family, Corwin and Elena are established as siblings in canon. There’s no canonical evidence of a relationship between Tremayne and Elena, much less of them having any children. That story element exists mainly for the purpose of giving their OC offspring a migraine-inducing, drama-infested family tree. Lydia has a skewed view of her family history due to her upbringing. Not everything she says about her family members can be taken literally, particularly if it’s about Corwin. Lydia hasn’t met him in person and learned about him solely through the accounts of her parents. They had reasons for not being the most reliable narrators on the subject.

Dachat (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dachat>)

[Barracles](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Barracle) are mythical monsters. Everyone on Shullia believes Garik Loran is dead because his survival isn’t common knowledge. The rumors about Ewok assassins came to them through garbled accounts of Wraith Squadron’s antics.  
  
They all know very little about the Empire’s Force-users, although Lydia herself has picked up on some tidbits through observation. Being an agricultural world in a small Imperial territory more or less surrounded by the New Republic, Shullia has been isolated from the few Imperial factions that still have Darksiders in power. There just isn’t much there that is of interest to the more ambitious groups.  
  
Rhajani’s thoroughly-dismissed theory about the Force-sensitive droid army has similarities to the [Iron Knights](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Iron_Knight), silicon-based Jedi Purge survivors who appear in _Star Wars Missions 14: The Monsters of Dweem_ by Dave Wolverton and in various sources that expand their background. They are fairly obscure and seem unusual though not impossible for the Star Wars universe. Rhajani has no reason to know about the Iron Knights, but her technology-obsessed mind happened to run in an eerily similar direction.  
  
Members of the [Grannan](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Grannan) species normally place the family name first and personal name last, so Chelii’s full name is Meuric Chelii.


	4. Like a Radioactive Circus Troupe (Month 1, Day 20)

**** 41 AE, Month 1, Day 20   
  
Well, that will teach me to be careful what I wish for! Yesterday afternoon was memorable, for lack of a better word. I have a feeling that it won’t make sense until four years from now, if ever. It’s not as though I don’t know when the meaning of my surroundings is flying over my head. Others taught me well enough that I can at least recognize the sound of important cues as they zoom past. That doesn’t give me the knowledge to figure them out yet. Good thing I’m primarily into the more techy side of things and can leave the more intense cloak and dagger stuff to others (except for when it suddenly falls on me, apparently.) Since I actually have things to do today, I’ll be splitting up this entry and adding to it when there is time.   
  
Not too long after making my last journal entry yesterday, I got a call through the comm system from Barrett. I knew it had to be urgent, since he isn’t the kind of person to use technology when he can yell down the hall instead.   
  
“Shelway!”   
  
Hoping this had nothing to do with mynocks, I responded, “Yes, Captain Barrett. Is something wrong?”   
  
“Not yet. You have first aid training?” Background noise filtered through and I could hear typing, electronic beeps, and clanks as well as the rustling of flimsiplast sheets. It sounded like he was doing spring cleaning while rewiring the ship. An alarm blared and was suddenly cut off. “Don’t pay that any mind. But do you at least know one end of a medpac from the other?”   
  
“…Yes. I wasn’t a medical student or anything like that, but they did teach us some basics. And I helped patch up blaster wounds and so on during the invasion on Shullia a couple of years ago.” Not one of my favorite memories, but maybe it would be helpful.   
  
“That’ll have to do.” He muttered something that I couldn’t hear clearly through the static. “There’s a high possibility that one of the people we’re gonna pick up on Dachat is injured. Probably a pretty bad wound. I’ve gotta stay with the ship and get the fuel taken care of, and Inquisitor Antilles has other things to do.” Inquisitor, _what_? Sure, my father and a few of his people are still around somewhere, but they’re not that common. “So you’ll go with Bramer and Zelenus until they split off to do their thing. Get the injured person stabilized and bring ‘em back in one piece.” Barrett sounded irritated. Suprisingly coherent, too. “Go to the cargo bay and I’ll meet you there. The tanks and bacta kits can be tricky to handle, so I’ll show you the fundamentals. Doubt you’ve seen much of this stuff lately out on the Rim.” Bacta kits didn’t sound familiar, though I had heard of bacta patches being used by the New Republic. On Shullia, we didn’t use bacta except for in cases of life-threatening injury. Sometimes the hospitals barely had enough to cover those instances. Did he really mean what I thought he meant, that there were whole bacta tanks on the _Draigon_? Perhaps medical supplies were part of the regular cargo.   
  
In the cargo bay, Barrett was already there and hauling out supplies by the time that I arrived. “Okay, there you are. Gonna have to be faster than that on Karkaryss.” Though I tried not to show it, I was a bit spooked by how present and aware he seemed. After I’d gotten used to his nearly-delusional mannerisms over the last few days, his focused attention was a sharp contrast. Direct eye contact revealed that he had unusual eyes, one iris a brown-splotched hazel color and one entirely green. “Shut your jaw and come take a look at the bacta kit here.” Busted! Usually people don’t notice when I observe something about them. Feeling sheepish, I examined the kit, which was of a design that I had never seen. Instead of being contained inside a carrying case like a regular medkit, it consisted of a large bag-like section full of bacta with various smaller bags and mechanical appliances attached.   
  
Barrett turned the contraption over, revealing a harness-like set of carrying straps. “Carrying these is pretty simple. You just put your arms through the straps and carry it on your back like a regular carry pack. Material’s tear-resistant, but try not to fall on it just in case.” He frowned a little. “Could be a bit heavy if you’re not used to it, I suppose. Let’s see you try it.”   
  
That part went well enough. Pitching in at the Meurics’ farm involved all kinds of glamorous activities that most people would prefer to avoid, like weeding out snapgrass from the nisu fields and carrying foul-tempered nerf calves (they’re only adorable when you don’t have to deal with them personally, as I soon learned.) And those were the “easy” jobs considered reasonable for a medium-sized human girl like myself. The bacta kit wasn’t especially light, being a lot like a huge package of water weight-wise, but I was already used to carrying heavier things. Fortunately, the kit would also be hidden inside a suitcase part of the time, so I wouldn’t have to carry it through the whole mission.   
  
Then we started on the complicated end of things, which was the proper way to apply the kit to a living, bleeding person. As it turned out, the extra bags were smaller packets of bacta and solution connected to the main bag. These were for missing limbs, head injuries, and other wonders that I had been just as happy not see for the last couple of years. Anything not in the stomach-and-torso region that the main bag adhered to after activation would need a packet instead. Packets could also be disconnected to use if the person had minor or localized injuries, though Barrett said this was unlikely. How reassuring. The technological items included a medical rebreather, a monitoring device that kept track of the vital signs, a resealing device that would allow the bag to be fastened around the patient after opening (a bit like a vest, if by vest one meant “life-preserving amoeba”), and a tool for patching slightly less hideous wounds with a quick-drying synthflesh mixture that would keep them from bleeding out. Getting the bacta bag secured around the injured person while keeping most of the bacta was important. As Barrett said, “Otherwise all you’ve done is pourin’ a bluish mess over a red one.” A clumsy splash of bacta wouldn’t be enough if the wounds were severe. There was no way to easily practice using the kit without wasting bacta, so I did my best to memorize every step of the process.   
  
Half an hour later, it was nearly time for planetfall. Zelenus and Bramer finally made an appearance. Both were wearing ordinary, slightly weathered-looking civilian clothing. They appeared to be my own age if not a bit younger.   
  
“Xenon Bramer. I’m in my second year at Karkaryss and studying in the Internal Security department.” The first one shook my hand formally and spoke with a very Coruscanti accent (which didn’t necessarily mean that was his homeworld; after all, my mother was regularly mistaken for a Coruscant native.) Bramer held a very strict, Imperial posture and had an unemotional expression that was probably not too different from my own. He was incredibly nervous. Sometimes disciplined serenity is what it appears to be and sometimes it’s merely a cover. There are subtle signs that you learn to pick up on if you live with someone who has any kind of Imperial training. Bramer’s dark skin and blue-green eyes reminded me of the Quian settlers on Shullia, although his close-cropped hair was a deeper shade of brown. His eyes never stopped scanning the room, taking in every detail. “This is Tamir Zelenus, ” he said, gesturing towards his companion, with about the same tone that he might have said “this is a blemish on my nose, I do hope you don’t mind.”   
  
Zelenus leaned slightly against the wall, looking as though he had just rolled out of bed and wished to return there as soon as possible. He blinked drowsily in the artificial light, his waxy complexion and unsteady posture making him appear ill. Though he seemed to be trying to achieve an attentive pose, he didn’t come near succeeding.   
  
“He’s a tech student,” Bramer added, as if that was the only explanation needed. Typical, I would have to pick the department with a great reputation.   
  
“Nice to meet you both. My name is Lydia Shelvay. I’ll be starting my first year with a technology specialization once we get to the university. Right now they have me bringing med supplies for the team on Dachat.”   
  
“Better you than me,” Zelenus said. “Looking at blood makes me want to hurl. And guts, I hate guts. They look like jelly –”   
  
Bramer cut him off, saying, “Thank you, Zelenus. I’ve heard what you think they look like. Shelvay probably knows too if they’re letting her do this. _Moving on_.”   
  
At that point, the conversation turned to our missions for the day. While I would be meeting a small group of people in a maintenance section of the refueling station at 6:15 PM and administering the bacta kit to their injured companion, Bramer and Zelenus would separate from me and go off to do their separate jobs. Bramer’s was too classified to share – or, I suspected, he just enjoyed playing it that way. Zelenus was going to deal with the security cameras and help to ensure that we weren’t spotted on our way back to the shuttle.   
  
Although the two were still students and had no actual rank, I was to follow their instructions due to my presumed inexperience. That didn’t bother me, since I had virtually no idea what was going on outside of my own tasks. The prospect of getting to leave the confines of the _Draigon_ did a lot more to lift my mood than the engine cleaner that Zelenus was passing off as caf. There was a bit of adrenaline flowing in my veins by the time we landed, but not as bad as it would have been when I was younger. I wouldn’t say that I was totally unbothered by the prospect of literally holding someone’s life in my hands, but it’s not as though I had never faced that before. At least this time the medical supplies were more advanced than engine tape (which does work sometimes, but it’s pretty ugly and not exactly the most sanitary way keep someone from bleeding to death.)   
  
We got our first glimpse of Dachat after exiting the shuttle. Although it was evening by the standard time used on the _Draigon_ , the season and location on planet meant that it was still nearly as bright as midday. Though I had only seen a few worlds outside of Shullia, this one was not going on my list of favorites by any stretch of the imagination. The combined refueling station and spaceport was ground-based, set in the middle of a vast, arid scrubland. Most of the surrounding vegetation was grayish-green in color and looked as dry as paper. The remains of one of the former great cities slumped on the horizon, the great craters in the ground and the toppled structures looking tiny due to the distance. The harsh sunlight beaming down from Dachat’s star didn’t suit the grim sight. It also made it more difficult for all of us to move unnoticed, since some artistic soul had decided to make the station walls out of transparisteel. Lacking the opportunity to lurk honestly, we played the part of tourists headed for Coruscant. I had some time to kill before the set meeting and the others were on a similar schedule for the time being.   
  
Zelenus became quite entertaining now that he had apparently finished with naptime. Once we left the docking bay, he decided that it was time to start making our cover believable, which for him entailed making us into the most obnoxious tourists possible. He made a production out of dragging Bramer and I over to a souvenir stand and proceeded to gush over the overpriced fluorescent merchandise.   
  
“Look, Deliya, they’ve got those lumi-plumies you’re always collecting!” He poked an orange atrocity that seemed to combine several features of the animal kingdom into a neon-lighted serpentine shape. Luminescent, glittering replications of feathers, scales, and fins dangled from its furry surface. To say that it was hideous would be doing the average hideous thing a terrible injustice. “Remember how you were looking for an orange one at the last stop?” Gentle, kindly, nurturing Guardians of the Harvest. My disbelief must have looked like admiration from a certain point of view, because the chirpy Omwati saleswoman immediately offered to let me try on the abomination.   
  
Doing a twirl in front of the stand’s convenient mirror and summoning every ounce of sugary-sweetness I could gather, I said, “How lovely, this would go perfectly with that dress I bought on Chandrila.” Gag me with an ysalamir. The lumi-plumi (shudder) was a shade of neon orange that went beyond violent and into eye-gouging territory, while the tacky decorations included every shade of the rainbow. It was possibly the most hellish accessory I had ever had the misfortune of seeing, and I’d seen some doozies at the embassy on Shullia. Trying not to clench my jaw too obviously, I unwrapped the lumi-plumi from my shoulders and petted it like a baby pittin. “So soft too, see?” I handed the monstrosity over to Zelenus with a sappy smile. This was going to require a really special revenge at a time when he least expected it. He winked at me while he turned away from the saleswoman’s view. All right, so his lack of self-preservation instincts was a little amusing. But if he thought that was going to save his hide…   
  
_Say farewell to your caf supply_ , I motioned in Thomorkan sign language, hoping that he had learned it as well.   
  
“It’s very nice,” he said with the uninterested tone of a male being asked for his opinion on female clothing. As if the whole thing had not been entirely his fault. _Stab straight for the heart, don’t you_?, he signed.   
  
_You’d better start believing it_ , I told him. I paid for the lumi-plumi, suddenly not so grateful for the store of New Republic credits that we had been given.   
  
Finally showing some common sense, Zelenus switched over to tormenting Bramer instead. “Let’s see what they have for shirts!” He nearly bounced over to the shirt rack and Bramer followed after, barely hiding his dismay. Bramer shifted impatiently as Zelenus plowed through the shirt rack, zeroing in on the worst of the worst specimens. I struggled with the need to get on with the mission myself, beginning to worry that I would be late if we dithered around much longer. Not that I couldn’t see Zelenus’s point about blending in little, but impulsivity won out this time.   
  
Elbowing him in the ribs just a little while inspecting an unspeakable neon pink hat, I signed, _Hurry it up just a little_. Bramer took advantage of Zelenus’s moment of distraction to retrieve one of the least garish shirts and flip the credits over to the saleswoman.   
  
“There, this one’s my, uh, favorite podracer.” He pulled the oversized shirt over his head very quickly, probably trying to outrun his wits before they could tell him what it actually looked like. The bright yellow shirt featured a design of a purple podcraft with a cartoon driver of unidentifiable species waving gleefully from the pilot’s seat. The sparkly Aurebesh print underneath said: SLUIS VAN SPECIALTY POD SHOP: REVERSING THE POLARITY OF THE NEUTRON FLOW SINCE 1200 BBY.   
  
Zelenus nodded seriously. “Oh, that is a good choice. Nice graphics.” Only if one was already blinded by the color scheme.   
  
Much to my delighted horror, he grabbed the terrible pink slime hat and purchased it in one fell swoop, setting it on his head proudly. It was a really bad hat. The glistening synthetic goop trails made it look even worse than the dreaded lumi-plumi. Not to mention that that shade of pink did nothing for his pastiness – or nothing good, at any rate. Well, at least I couldn’t say that he wasn’t willing to take what he dished out.   
  
Having accomplished our disguises, we straggled off looking more like a radioactive circus troupe than would-be Imperial agents. Zelenus and Bramer disappeared into the crowd. I checked my chronometer, finding that there was still plenty of time to reach the meeting point. The main problem would be to avoid looking suspicious if anybody noticed me wandering where I shouldn’t. After a near-traffic accident involving my lumi-plumi and an oblivious tourist’s antlered hat, the answer became clear. I grabbed a flimsiplast map from the first information desk I could find and proceeded to walk around aimlessly, glancing at it now and then. Eventually I reached my goal, though not without dodging a few people’s efforts to help (most of them well-intentioned with the exception of one who would be busy applying a bone-knitter to his foot for the forseeable future.)   
  
I reached the meeting place before anyone else, although the dimensions of the maintenance tunnels required me to abandon the suitcase and carry the bacta kit for several minutes before reaching the right location. After twelve minutes of waiting, I began to wonder if the map Barrett had shown me was accurate and whether some very confused people were waiting for me half a mile away. However, sounds of movement gradually became louder and there was an increase in the sense of others’ presence that sometimes comes to me (nowhere near as accurately as it would for someone with real powers, but I’m considered “Force-attuned” by some people’s standards.) An ominous mechanical noise was followed by the sound of running footsteps, much closer now. There was also a sound of… retching?   
  
“That turbolift isn’t meant for people, you numbskull!”   
  
“Hush up,” called another voice. “We’re almost there.”   
  
An eerie bellow worthy of a swamp wyrm sounded in the distance.   
  
“Oh, shavooh. Run, run, run, run, _run_!” The call ended on a note of hyperventilated panic.   
  
Ever since Barrett’s call, I had been trying to suppress the thought. Optimism is better for one’s blood pressure. Also, the ear of fate seems to listen for any slip-ups. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I just plain had a bad feeling about this, in a major way. Very, very bad.

 

**Notes** :

Quian (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Quian_(people>))

Omwati (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Omwati>)

Pittin (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pittin>)

Force- attuned (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force-attunement>)


	5. Isurus (41 AE, Month 1, Day 20)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 20**   
  
Now that I’ve finished  ~~being kicked and dragged across the ship like an acklay’s chew toy~~ demonstrating my combat skills to Junior Inquisitor Lesedi, I intend to ~~curl up in the fetal position and whimper in pain~~ continue writing down more of yesterday’s events.

  
  
Since the approaching group sounded like they were in trouble, I left the bacta supplies in a corner and began to move towards the voices. The bacta kit could be retrieved later and might only get in my way if there was fighting. The medical tools and a smaller bacta bag went into the pockets of my jacket since they were more manageable. It didn’t take long to find the noise-makers. Not wanting to alert them if they weren’t the ones I was supposed to meet, I tried to observe from the shadows as they rounded the corner. That proved to be a bad idea.   
  
“Ouch,” I gasped, struggling to get back the breath that had been knocked out of me on impact. The newcomers loomed over me, suddenly only a few feet away. Before I could process what had just happened, I was hoisted off the floor again and found myself face-to-face with a very irritable-looking man. He was only inches away and as the memory, speech, and death-prevention portions of my brain struggled to do something very important, the useless observations department focused on his eyes. They were dark around the edges, but each had an orange-yellow cloud of specks around the pupil. The bright spots seemed to move as I watched and the movement was hypnotic, almost like looking into a flame.   
  
My head ached, reminding me of the cold headaches that I used to get. Those headaches had always started with my dreams, back when I could remember them. Okay, that was fine. I knew what to do with the cold headaches. There had been so many spacers and tourists passing through the crowded parts of the station. All I needed to do was to remember that feeling, the _there_ -ness of them all around me. Just that, nothing else. I wasn’t here. Just the crowds. Nobody home here. Out there, so many people rushing by, looking for their next transport, needing fuel for their ships, wanting to buy a meal or a datacard, or even a hideous souvenir. So much motion and noise, while here there was only quiet. There was something about yellow eyes. Uh oh. Air would be nice. There wasn’t any air? Very yellow eyes. Only one color. Must have seen them wrong. Trick of the light. There were words and numbers that someone might need. Those were important. Words. Cold. Head hurt. Needed words.   
  
Breathing. That was better. Maybe someone was willing to see reason. No, wait. They were busy talking. Probably just distracted. Shavooh, with feeling. Where was a stun grenade when you needed one? I had my blaster, but good luck reaching that when you're floating in the air.   
  
“… shields. This is not what we were informed to expect.” Twenties or thirties, male, an accent that I couldn’t place.   
  
“Do you think she might be working with the Rebels, Inquisitor?” Younger male. Coruscanti, maybe.   
  
Rebels! That “she” better not be me. I angrily twitched my feet. If I ever got to solid ground again, they were going to hear about this. Except that there were those yellow eyes. So maybe not.   
  
_I am NOT a Rebel_ , I struggled to think as loudly as possible. Force-users were mind-readers, right? Right now I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen or heard of one receiving someone’s exact word-for-word thoughts. Most that I had met acted like they knew everything about everyone’s business. However, I knew for a fact that Isander made mistakes. I didn't want to end up as a black mark on Inquisitor Somebody’s resume.   
  
Thinking at the yellow-eyed man seemed to get his attention. He quickly turned back in my direction and stared at me. My headache returned and increased. It felt like there were hailstones dancing inside my brain, but then the pain lessened. The hold that kept me in the air was released and I stumbled slightly as my feet hit the ground.   
  
Drawing a deep breath, I said, “I came here from the shuttle. The code that I was supposed to give is Theta 471 Kalsunor.”   
  
Yellow Eyes nodded slightly in recognition, but still watched me with a narrow gaze.   
  
“Khar Shian 805,” he answered with the code that Barrett had told me to expect. “We asked for medical assistance. Where are the supplies?”   
  
Given how he had first greeted me, I wasn’t sure whether to be glad that these were the people on my side or not. On one hand, I was supposedly with allies. On the other, living on a shuttle with Yellow Eyes around didn’t sound pleasant.   
  
“I left the large bacta bag a short distance away and only brought the smaller tools with me. It sounded like there was some sort of immediate danger and the bacta kit was slowing me down.” Although that had seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision at the time, Yellow Eyes’s disapproving expression became grimmer.   
  
“What kind of idiot taught you – never mind. Apparently your telekinetic skills are pathetic.”   
  
I was sure that those were supposed to be fighting words. Too bad that I could not have cared less. At the moment, I was a lot more concerned with remaining among the living. Still remembering the roar that had worried me before, I worked up the courage to ask, “Are you being pursued?”   
  
“Not at the moment. That creature is dead.” Yellow Eyes looked self-satisfied. He brushed at a spot on his dark coat and his hand became covered in drying blood and something glittery. Leave it to a Force-user to be preening when he’s splashed with gore. Smugness seems to come with the territory.   
  
“Alopex, you and Odon will take the shark kibble,” he looked at me disdainfully, “with you and treat Isurus’s injuries before you move him to the shuttle. I need to dispose of the evidence,” he said, moving away into a side tunnel.   
  
I had been preoccupied with Yellow Eyes and my impending doom up until then, so it was the first time that I really got a look at the rest of the Force-user’s companions. Alopex and Odon – I couldn’t be sure which was which – both looked about my age. The first one I noticed was a tall human man with a stony expression. He had some sort of weapon in his left hand, though it was mostly hidden by the sleeve of his cloak. The pieces of metal that I could see didn’t look like a typical holdout blaster. There were too many sharp points in odd places. The other standing individual was a willowy, brown-haired girl who carried the injured man with no sign of effort.   
  
Isurus did not look like an easy cargo, though he had probably started out the day heavier than he was now. Now that I had a better view of him, I got the uneasy feeling that it might be too late for him. He wasn’t dead yet, but that was about the best thing that I could say. Since Yellow Eyes had time to give me the third degree, I had begun to suspect that Isurus’s injuries were not critical. Apparently, I had misjudged the situation. Isurus had visible burns on his face and arms where they were uncovered and the makeshift wrapping over his abdomen was stained with blood. His right leg was missing from somewhere below the knee and the wound had been hastily bandaged. He looked barely conscious.   
  
Between the grayish skin tone and the sense of fading presence that seemed to wrap around him, he reminded me all too much of several people who didn’t make it after being wounded in the invasion. Domitilla’s brother Gordian was the only one that badly injured that I had cared for on my own. There were too many severely injured people that day due to a skirmish with Slone’s pirates. It was impossible for the more experienced volunteers to oversee all of the wounded. Gordian died in less than an hour. Amets Grania, the local veterinarian (and the best doctor we had available at the time), came to help before the end. She claimed that there was nothing more that I could have done for him, but I’m not sure if that was the truth or just her way of comforting me. Like nearly everyone else there, I had only the first aid training learned in school to start with and learned what I could out of necessity when disaster struck.   
  
Removing the medical supplies from my pockets, I asked the woman holding Isurus, “Can you lay him down on the floor? He’s probably gone into shock,” I said, guessing based on his appearance. “I’d like to get his some of his wounds sealed and put this bacta packet on his leg before I do anything else.” She set him down and watched with detached interest as I placed the medical monitor on his wrist.   
  
His breathing and pulse were too fast, according to the readout. That only reinforced my feeling that moving him any further wasn’t going to help matters. I tried to think of how to retrieve the rest of the supplies without leaving Isurus alone. For now, I placed the medical rebreather on his face. That would at least keep his breathing easier and more regulated. Trying be as gentle as possible, I unwrapped the cloth from his leg. Isurus flinched and made a faint sound of pain as the bandage was removed.   
  
The tall man quietly said, “I’ll go and find the rest of the bacta. She won’t be difficult to backtrack.” I would have told him which way to go, but he had already disappeared and so I turned back to treating Isurus.   
  
Looking at the leg wound, I winced in sympathy. The messy cut was clearly the work of a vibro-bladed weapon of some sort, probably one of the larger vibro-swords since it looked like the result of a sweeping blow rather than a targeted stab. From personal experience, I knew that any wound created by a vibro-blade that shattered the bone was unbearably painful, especially because the unstable vibrations of the blade as it passed through caused bone shards to dig in to the surrounding flesh. Moving as fast as I could manage carefully, I removed as many obvious shards as I could before opening and attaching the bacta packet. Isurus would still have pieces of bone in his leg that would need removal after the rest had healed, unfortunately. Only a medical droid or doctor would be able to fix that for him.   
  
The abdominal wound was possibly the most serious. However, the bleeding appeared to have reduced some time ago. I did not want to worsen it by accident and felt that it should wait for the larger bacta bag.   
  
Using the synthflesh spray tool, I was able to patch the burns on his face and hands. Pushing sweat-soaked pale hair away from his forehead, I laid my hand on an unburned patch of skin and could feel that it was too cool to the touch. Worried that there might be more injuries unseen, I asked the brown-haired woman, “Do you know if he has any more burns or wounds? I’d rather not remove clothing and risk jarring his other wounds if it’s not necessary.”   
  
She placed her hand on his shoulder and regarded him with an even more distant look. Then she shook her head negatively. “He has a burn on his back, but to reach it you would have to lay him on his stomach. It’s not as bad as this,” she said, pointing at the abdominal wound.   
  
A soft thud on the floor next to me announced the tall man’s return with the bacta bag. Given how easily he slipped away before, it was less than surprising that he had reappeared so suddenly.   
  
As I opened the bag and prepared to move Isurus in order to wrap it around him, I said, “Thank you. I apologize for not asking before, but is there a form of address that I need to use with both of you?” Social concerns had slipped my mind up until now due to Isurus’s need for treatment.   
  
The tall man didn’t respond. The brown-haired woman made a dismissive gesture. “Not when we’re planetside. On the shuttle or in friendly territory there would be more of a need for formalities. For now, Odon is his name and mine is Alopex.”   
  
I applied and resealed the bacta bag as gently as I could manage, but it was clearly painful for Isurus, who tensed and grimaced at every move. Luckily, the process went off without a hitch otherwise. His fragile state worried me, since we still needed to transport him back to the shuttle. At least the bacta would help to keep his problems from worsening.   
  
Once the bacta bag was secured, Alopex scooped up Isurus and headed off into one of the righthand maintenance paths. It felt like a narrow space, but had a high enough ceiling that only Odon had to crouch slightly to walk. He walked beside me and seemed a little amused at my obvious confusion that Alopex was the one carrying the injured party. “Telekinesis helps,” he murmured after a while. I filed that for later reference, not quite feeling ready to believe my eyes yet.

  
  
More later, since I need to be at the cargo bay in a few minutes. My muscles hate me, but it feels so much better to be busy again. The inactivity at the start of this trip was unbearable.   


 

 **Notes** :

Synthflesh (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Synthflesh>)

Several of the character names and aliases in these chapters have a shared theme (though not all of them.)

Deliya Heringshai (Lydia's fake name) - surname taken from the German name for the porbeagle shark (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porbeagle>)

Pelagia Alopex - from _Alopias pelagicus_ (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagic_thresher>)

Triaen Odon - from _Triaenodon obesus_ (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitetip_reef_shark>)

Isurus - from the genus name of mako sharks (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isurus>)


	6. Hoversled Clichés and Incriminating Holos (Month 1, Day 20)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 20**   
  
Now that my tasks are over for the day, I have some more time for writing. Although my attempts at keeping a diary never lasted long before, it’s been helpful in organizing my thoughts over the last few days. I am going to have to start deleting my entries after I type them. Not that there is anything in here that I would consider particularly interesting, but Inquisitor Ombyrne might have an unfortunate reaction to my nicknaming him Yellow Eyes. From what I’ve seen so far, Bramer and Lesedi both strike me as being a lot like my mother’s descriptions of her younger self – very eager to live up to an impossible standard of perfection and having an unfortunate tendency to interpret words and actions as anti-Imperial. Odon speaks little of his own opinions and I’m not clear on what makes him tick. Inquisitor Antilles is a complete unknown and Zelenus is nearly as mysterious simply because he seems so different from the other students. I can’t imagine Captain Barrett showing much curiosity about anyone’s writings, but then he’s surprised me more than once. There is also a possibility that there are more unknown passengers on board the _Draigon_ , though there can’t be more than one or two. Given how many people are around now and how little I know about most of them, it seems wiser not to keep this journal in a permanent form.

  
  
Within a few minutes, Alopex stopped in front of a nondescript door. Odon did something to the keypad (I couldn’t see exactly what, since Isurus’s body was blocking the view) and managed to open the door. Inside the room was a maintenance hoversled much like several that I had seen on my way through the station and a pile of mechanics’ uniforms. Bringing Isurus over to the hoversled, Alopex opened the lid of the machine’s main compartment. The usual large stash of tools and supplies had been removed, leaving just enough room for a passenger. Inconspicuous holes had been made in the compartment in order to let some oxygen circulate. After settling Isurus into the hoversled, Alopex used some kind of tape which I didn’t remember ever seeing before to fasten his body in place. The tape seemed to carry a faint charge of some kind, sparking slightly, which made me wonder if it was uncomfortable to touch. However, it made sense that a strong enough tape might keep Isurus from rolling over inside the hoversled and further injuring himself.   
  
While Alopex was dealing with Isurus, Odon went over to the uniforms and put one on over the close-fitting dark clothes he already wore. He gestured me towards the pile, indicating that I too should find a uniform. It took a little while, since I was apparently shorter than most of the maintenance staff members whose spare uniforms Odon and Alopex had borrowed. Finding a uniform that was only a little too large, I removed my jacket and put the suit on over my other clothes.    
  
I was a little bit startled to see the discarded jacket levitate and swoop over to land in the hoversled compartment beside Isurus when Alopex waved her hand. It was a good place to keep it out of the way and avoid leaving behind evidence, but I had never before met a female Force-user, much less one that could obviously use telekinesis.    
  
Actually, I never even saw evidence of any women in the Inquisitorius with one possible exception, a short woman in her fifties or sixties that I had glimpsed from a distance long ago (and that one had been doing nothing out of the ordinary except for willingly chatting with Loam Redge; it was the maroon cloak and the design of the clothes visible underneath that made me suspect she was an Inquisitor herself.)    
  
While Alopex changed into her maintenance worker disguise, Odon took the opportunity to fill me in on the plan for getting Isurus to the shuttle.    
  
“The other students that you met on the way here will be making a distraction which should keep us from being stopped on the way. Since we had to make such a mess,” he said, scowling a little. “We may need to fake an emergency to get through if someone has raised the alarm. Let Alopex and I do most of the talking and make sure you only look nervous if we do so as well.”   
  
I nodded and said “Yes, I understand”, since he didn’t seem to require much response. He was already busy with his next job by the time he was done talking. Some kind of handheld device that he was consulting was the focus of most of his eye contact and attention.   
  
It was somewhat difficult not to laugh at the cliché-ness of the situation. Smuggling people around in maintenance hoversleds is a common trick in spy holoflicks and I could hardly believe that anyone had ever actually used that method. On the other hand, if it worked for us then I wouldn’t complain.   
  
Once the lid on the storage compartment was closed, we all headed out of the maintenance area and towards the parking area where the shuttle waited. The hoversled was controlled by whatever device Odon was carrying, though it also seemed to move on autopilot at times, which usually sent it off in the wrong direction. By the time we made it past the souvenir stands, he was giving both hoversled and remote control device narrow-eyed stares that would curdle a Wookiee’s blood.    
  
As we neared the docking bay, I noticed that the lights were flickering. It hardly darkened the environment thanks to the sunlight streaming in through the transparisteel walls, but it seemed to distract people, especially the station employees. The internal comms and computer systems were experiencing errors too if all of the people messing with wires and muttering obscenities at the holoscreens of their work stations were any indication. We were ignored, since everyone else was busy with their own technical problems. 

  
  
While I had hoped to finish more writing, the truth is that I am flat out tired. Maybe I’ll be able to catch up to today tomorrow. More training in the morning. I’m afraid I might have to be eternally grateful to Zelenus for convincing Lesedi not to sign me up for lightsaber dueling. After all, I can afford to be benevolent since I now have incriminating holos of him in that horrible pink hat. He'll never figure out where I hid them. 

 

**Notes** :

Hoversled (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hoversled>)

Loam Redge (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Loam_Redge>)


	7. Hierarchies (Month 1, Day 21)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 21**  
  
Good news: Zelenus shared some dry ration bars so I don’t have to fight with the ‘fridge for every single meal (even when I tried the key, it didn’t work very well.) Bad news: These ration bars taste exactly the way dead granite slugs smell.   


 

Okay, so we were ungracefully trooping through the spaceport with a not-at-all-suspicious hoversled that said “ _HEAARRGJLLLawweiiiieee_ ” every time Odon had to hit the brake to avoid a pedestrian.   
  
Odon affected a pitiful hacking cough that ensured the other travelers kept their distance. Well, except for the wizened Yarin grove-mother who insisted on giving him a leafwork bag of herbal tea and seemed inclined to adopt him right out of the herd. I could see Alopex staring a laser-hole right through the tree woman’s forehead and felt (or imagined?) the static that seems to gather in my spine when Force-users do their thing. The Yarin seemed entirely unaffected. I wondered if all that static flowed around her like water currents around a rock or if it just ceased to exist where she began. Fortunately, Odon was able to ease her worry by promising to drink the tea twice daily and she departed. We were probably only half as relieved as the slouching grand-seedlings who ambled along in her wake. The poor kids were cleary embarrassed – they had been trying to hide in the spaceport’s potted greenery plantings during the whole encounter.   
  
We nearly reached the _Draigon_ without any more incidents. Most of the people passing through were focused on their own travels and further distracted by the malfunctioning computers and machines throughout the spaceport. A cluster of real technicians passed us by without a glance, hot on the heels of a customs inspection droid which was emitting an ear-splitting squall as it galloped through the crowd with a pair of fluffy trousers over its head and mismatched socks on each of its eight limbs. “Not this malarky again,” one of the techs grumbled as they dodged through the crowd. Again. Really. Sometimes you don’t even want to know.   
  
A movement near one of the parked spaceships caught my eye. It was Mr. Creepy of the recently-stomped foot. He glared at me sullenly and I could hear his voice rise as he whined into his comlink. Blech. Apparently he had the nerve to report me to security for “unprovoked violence.” Trying to corner lost teenagers in the spaceport apparently wasn’t provocation in his book. Suppressing a grimace, I silently awarded him extra creep points in addition to his already-earned total.   
  
I turned to signal to my companions, but Alopex was already murmuring something in Odon’s ear that made him pick up the pace. We were nearly running flat out to keep up with the hoversled when the _Draigon_ came into view. The shuttle’s boarding ramp descended and Bramer swiftly came down to meet us with a large mesh-net object draped over his shoulder. Odon maneuvered the hoversled to a point between one of the outer wings and main body of the shuttle. While blocking the view of passerby as much as possible, Bramer and Alopex began removing tools from the outer compartments of the hoversled as though they were intending to work on the ship. I took the netting when Bramer passed it over. There was a sudden commotion off to the left, but the others deliberately ignored it, so I did the same. Odon keyed open the inner compartment of the hoversled and removed the binding tape with a tool that I did not recognize. He then laid Isurus down on the netting (which I had at least managed to guess the purpose of; it wasn’t so very different from the crash webbing used in vehicles and would make a reasonable tool for carrying a person-sized object.) Abandoning the hoversled on the ground, the four of us carted Isurus into the ship in the improvised hammock.   
  
We had barely cleared the door when the ship’s engines fired for takeoff. Yellow Eyes and Zelenus were waiting inside, the former looking none too pleased with what he saw. He seemed to make a point of looming beside Bramer and I as we transferred Isurus into one of the bacta tanks in the cargo bay. I did my best not to show it, but my skin was crawling. Being around Force-users makes me nervous, even when they weren’t just choking me twenty minutes ago. It’s like running into a massiff spider out in the forest. Sure, it will probably turn around and vanish into the bush after a second, but in that first moment when you’re looking into those glittering compound eyes and you know it’s looking right back in turn, time just stops. There’s something all too wild and hungry that fills up the space and steals the warmth from your blood. My hands were steady, but only because the reflex of taking care of people in emergencies is pretty engrained from all those weeks during the invasion.   
  
Even though we managed to get him into the tank and hooked up to the machines properly, I had little faith that Isurus would make it. The other few times I had seen people in bacta, they appeared almost restful in spite of their injuries. Isurus reminded me less of them and more of the winterbird that Chelii and I found preserved in the ice down by the Meurics’ pond last spring. It was like a perfect, tiny model of a bird, but its wings were twisted and broken. Maybe they broke when the bird fell into the icy water, or maybe it destroyed its own wings trying to beat its way through to the surface. I remembered thinking it was terribly unfair, even though it probably wasn’t reasonable to feel that way. How many pleasant ways could the life of a wild bird end? Sooner or later, it would have become ill, starved, or ended up as the dinner of some other animal. Looking at Isurus’s gray-white face through the bacta fluid, all I could think of was the feeble excuse that I had spoken over the bird, _Things shouldn’t die in the wrong place_. As though that could change a thing.   
  
After the bacta tank was set up, it had to be returned to its chamber. Zelenus and Bramer did this part, since it was entirely unfamiliar to me. Normally bacta tanks are kept in a free-standing, upright position, but the eight kept on the _Draigon_ had apparently been modified to rest flat inside of rectangular chambers bolted to the floor. I guessed that this was an adaptation to the demands of traveling in a small ship with relatively weak inertial compensators. The added stability would help to keep the tank from shifting too much and further injuring any patients.   
  
Zelenus and Bramer then went to report to Yellow Eyes, and I followed and did my best to imitate their posture. What seemed vague to me about the hierarchy in place here was clearly well-known to them. I followed the baseline assumption that I was at the bottom of the pecking order and watched anxiously for cues, hoping that I could remain silent and avoid showing my ignorance of just what in the stars was supposed to be happening. The last thing I wanted was any more of Yellow Eyes’ attention. Even though it was an accident, the fact that I had gotten security called on me made me fear that I was in for a very bad day. Fortunately, he seemed to consider me beneath his notice, not even looking in my direction. My companions were not faring as well, and one in particular seemed to be in the hot seat.   
  
“Bramer.”   
  
A slight tensing in Bramer’s jaw was the only sign he gave of the flinch that I am pretty sure all three of us were feeling. I silently gave thanks that we had at least managed to ditch our more embarrassing disguises in favor of the tech outfits.   
  
“Would you care to explain why you and Zelenus managed to turn a simple retrieval mission into a slapstick routine in a matter of minutes? Do I honestly need to explain to you how appalled I am at the fact that a _mechanical appliance_ was the most effective and discreet member of your little pickup team?” He favored Bramer with a sulfuric glare of contempt. I barely resisted the urge to step backwards, even though I was only on the far edge of the line of fire.   
  
At that point, Zelenus did flinch and I barely stopped myself from turning around to look at him like a passerby gaping at a hovercar accident. His hand flew to his throat and for an instant I was afraid that Yellow Eyes was trying out his little choking trick again, but then I saw a spindly black shadow emerging from the collar of Zelenus’s civilian disguise. It wasn’t until the shadow slowed down, perching on the blond-haired student’s shoulder, that I could see it was a droid and not some sort of animal. Its body was defined by a labyrinth of minute articulated joints with a few small processors nested here and there among the delicately interwoven metal pieces. The entire droid was only about the size of a half-grown mau kitten.   
  
Though I’m primarily into programming and slicing, the fantastic craftsmanship made me crave a chance to examine the little machine more closely. Preferably while it was in a deactivated state. For a small droid, it had a rather intimidating demeanor, and Zelenus did not seem reassured when it settled into a mantis-like posture with two sharp-looking elaborate legs held in an upraised position.   
  
Bramer swallowed but remained stone still. “Inquisitor Ombyrne, I apologize for the inconvenience caused by the system malfunctions. The technicians on Dachat updated their security since last time and the slicing triggered new traps in the computer. There was no time to reprogram the security cams, so I used the datachip with the roulette virus.”   
  
So that was why the spaceport’s electronics had gone on the blink. It was clearly the work of someone in our party, that much did not surprise me, but I had thought that it might be an ion generator of some sort. Roulette viruses are known to most teenagers (any past uses of which Rhajani and I will utterly deny, particularly in connection with the purple-custard-in-the-cafeteria-mystery-meat incident – which was at least 75% her fault, by the way.) They are normally used to infect relatively simple computer-driven machines and cause repeated occurrences of random malfunctions. However, I had rarely heard of their use outside of juvenile pranking contexts. The unpredictability and limited range of most roulette viruses normally makes them of limited use to people hoping to avoid notice or to cause mass destruction.   
  
Ombyrne still seemed unwilling to give any quarter based on Bramer’s explanation. “You caused a fiasco that drew the attention of the entire spaceport.” The static was back, a faint sandpaper-hiss of spiking electricity. My stomach was beginning to churn with worry. If things went bad… Inquisitor Tremayne once went through at least five subordinates and two unlucky bystanders in the course of one visit to my homeworld. That happened only a couple of weeks after the destruction of Byss and the death of the reborn Emperor, so I assumed that was an unusual level of violence brought on by a severe bad mood. Still, it did not bode well for us.   
  
“I understand, Inquisitor. The new programming was outside of the range that the normal failsafe measures cover. Once I review the data recordings of where the process went wrong, I will add extra precautions to the usual procedure for any more slicing attempts.” The unspoken thing which surprised me was that Bramer made no reference to Zelenus, who had been his backup for the mission. Not that I had necessarily expected him to throw the other student under the hoverbus, but it made me re-evaluate his earlier signs of disapproval.   
  
Maybe it was just the high-strung first impression he had made in my mind, but I honestly would not have thought Bramer had it in him. In his place, I was not sure if I could have strung two words together. Okay, so that wasn’t strictly true. I knew that I could be a regular fountain of words when in enough trouble, and even fairly convincing. But I didn’t think I would have come out of that conversation alive.   
  
Bramer somehow did. Ombyrne paused for a few heart-stopping seconds, but then the lines on his forehead smoothed and the yellow fire seemed to drain from his eyes.   
  
“Send a copy of all the revisions to me by noon tomorrow.” The Inquisitor lifted his right arm quickly and I again had to restrain myself from cringing away. The odd droid on Zelenus’s shoulder leapt with the grace of a tiny nexu and landed on Ombyrne’s arm. “Remember that this is all going on your record, and I am not inclined to be generous,” he growled, making sure to give each of us a menacing stare before he turned and marched away.   
  
It was such a comfort to know that we would all be sharing a transport with this happy person for another week. There was just no way that could go wrong, was there? I wondered if I could just hide in the maintenance closet the whole time. Nope, no way. Captain Barrett would _know_ and have an absolute fit. There are hazards and then there are hazards.   
  
Zelenus pulled me aside while Bramer left to work on his project. “Junior Inquisitor Lesedi – that would be Alopex, who you met earlier – said to tell you to wait for her here in the cargo bay. Apparently she went over your records and decided that the standardized skill tests weren’t extensive enough for determining your placement in the Tech program. It’s a pretty common issue when students come from the Outer Rim territories. They ran some extra tests for me too.”   
  
He rolled his eyes just a little and I nodded sympathetically. Imperials who were born in the Core before the New Republic took over tend to look down on the rest of us, even as they become more scarce with passing years. I met a number of them when I attended high school in Tulekahju back home. Many students whose parents were from the Core assumed that the rest of us were ignorant hicks, regardless of our actual intelligence or achievements. Though I never tried to emphasize my background (after all, I wanted to make friends, not scare everyone away), I’ll admit that I got a certain guilty vindictive pleasure from the reactions of such students if and when they found out exactly who my parents were. They tended to become studiously polite from that point forward. However, they also avoided me like the Iridian plague. Hence my not mentioning the subject very often.   
  
Although he continued talking (it seemed to be a humorous story about his first days as a student, but I soon lost track), Zelenus began a second conversation in Thomorkan sign. _Be careful of Lesedi. Actually, Bramer too. And a lot of the other students. If you’re from an obscure outlying system like mine, you probably grew up in a less… traditional environment than many of them._   
  
He was beginning to worry me a little. The sign he had used meant “traditional”, but it was often used to describe a strict religious tradition. Not knowing him well, I was unsure whether he was hinting that the subjects of his description were fanatical, or that I was the one in violation of a strong taboo. Zelenus stopped signing and rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. _Sorry_ , he eventually continued. _Look. You’re fine, Bramer and Lesedi are fine, everybody is fine, all right? Not intending to say anything bad about any of us. It’s just a difference of culture. They may not be okay with things that you take for granted._   
  
_Like what?_ I replied, still wondering if I should be offended. Just because I came from a Rimworld didn’t mean I had been raised in a barn, after all! Within walking distance of several barns, certainly, but not in one.   
  
_I only wanted to tell you because it was difficult for me when I first came to Karkaryss. From what I’ve seen so far, I think you may have a bit of the same problem._  
  
_Which is?_ I asked with decreasing patience.   
  
Zelenus shrugged uncomfortably. _Mostly it’s that you may have a rare condition known as a sense of humor. No, I mean it_ , he signed when I looked at him doubtfully. _Not that humor is forbidden or something. It’s just that it’s more – not sure how to put this into Thomorkan. Puns work. Funny stories sometimes work. Depends on the story. But the kind of humor where you look at things and mix them around in your head and come up with something so strange that it’s funny, or funny because it’s true in a way? I can see you doing that, just from the way you seemed to react to the game with the costumes on Dachat. Anyway, sometimes that really upsets them – the kind of upset where you end up in the brig or worse._ His expression went from serious to something bordering on grim. _Some of them think you aren’t loyal to the Empire if you don’t have every obscure tenet of the New Order memorized perfectly._   
  
_Actually, I’m pretty sure I have that covered_ , I responded. _My mother was in the ISB. If she didn’t have me study an Imperial philosophy backwards and forwards since I was knee-high, it probably doesn’t exist._ Never mind that Mum’s take on said philosophies probably would have scandalized some of their creators. The fact remained that those ideas were her foundation and she had made more than certain to pass them on. Even if it drove us both to distraction.   
  
_And the thing that really worries me for you is your curiosity. I know there is a lot here that you don’t understand or have never seen, but don’t let anyone see that if you can help it. Study what you’re supposed to study and stay out of the rest as much as you can._  
  
_Now you sound like a cheap horror holofilm. I should disregard your sage advice and go off to investigate the haunted derelict starship. While wearing impractical shoes_ , I told him. My expression might have been a few degrees too defensive. _But I won’t. At least, not on purpose. Look, I understand about things needing to be left alone. Mum had about a third of the house that I wasn’t allowed in because there might be classified information. Locked away several times over and guarded by traps within traps, if I knew her at all. I can learn to get by here. It just will take a little time._   
  
Zelenus was beginning to look exasperated. In hindsight, I feel bad about that. He did not deserve the blame for my fear that I was going barvy for running off to nearly-uncharted space when I could have stayed on Shullia and raised Fallowan Spitting Eopies for the rest of my life. I suppose it was more of a sore point for me than I realized.   
  
_It’s your funeral_ , he said, followed by a sign that stood for “washing my hands of this.”   
  
_I promise not to do anything stupid_ , I replied and hoped that I had not alienated him too badly since he seemed to be one of the only remotely friendly people on the ship.   
  
He rubbed the back of his neck and breathed out as though he had a mild ache. _I’m holding you to that. We Tech students have to stick together – after all, for some reason the architects put our quarters right between Enforcement Operations and Internal Security, not to mention piling Investigations and a satellite branch of the Junior Inquisitorius on top of us – and worse yet, next to each other – on the next floor up. Why they didn’t stick us in the tower with Analysis is something I will never fathom. But there you have it, home sweet home, right between a rock and a hard place and the sharks._ Zelenus smiled ruefully. _I’m afraid you won’t see much of me while we’re traveling since I have a mild intolerance for hyperspace. Better to just sleep through it as much as possible. Try not to impress our esteemed fellow student with your temper and maybe we’ll make it to landing._   
  
We transitioned into meaningless small talk and said goodbye. Several minutes passed as I waited anxiously before Lesedi arrived to administer my doom.   


  
  
Speaking of which, there is a rather nasty imprint of a boot on my rib cage that needs salving again, and my right shoulder needs to be treated with some muscle-soothing gel if I don’t want to be lurching around like an armless gundark by tomorrow. On the bright side, I’m not dead yet!

 

 

 **Notes** :

Granite slug (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Granite_slug>)

Yarin (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Yarin>)

The reference to Byss (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Byss>) also relates to the failure of Operation Shadow Hand in 10 ABY (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Operation_Shadow_Hand>)

Thomork (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Thomork>); the sign language is one that I headcanon as being developed as a military signaling technique first and foremost -- although it has evolved into a more complicated form that beginners like Lydia and Zelenus haven't studied.

Fallowan (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Fallowan>)


	8. Last Seen Running for the Next Star System (Month 1, Day 22)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 22**   
  
Oww. Shoulder has checked out and was last seen running for the next star system. Refrigerator unit is unwilling to open and rations still taste like processed granite slugs. Shipmates are busy, antisocial, comatose, or trying to kill me with push-ups and obscure weapons. Good sleep is next to impossible between sore muscles, stress about my upcoming introduction to Karkaryss (only five days left), and nagging worry about Isurus. I really hope I didn’t botch his care to the point that he won’t recover. There hasn’t been any news one way or the other and I suppose there is no way to know until we can offload him at a real medical facility.    
  


  
Lesedi eventually arrived with a datapad and a light carrying case. She acknowledged my salute and greeting calmly. To my relief, she seemed less agitated than Ombyrne and brought no foreboding sense of approaching thunder. Leading me over to a small cluster of built-in benches at the edge of the cargo bay, she had me sit down beside her at arm’s length and placed the datapad between us. Then she scared the living daylights out of me by bringing out a hypo-syringe from the case.    
  
Now, I have an extremely limited knowledge of exactly what Inquisitors and other professional interrogators do in their day-to-day work, but even so, it’s pretty well understood by everyone that going for the needles is a Very Bad Sign in flashing lights. Lesedi undoubtedly noticed the tensing of my shoulders and hitch in my breathing before I could stop it. I possibly redeemed myself slightly by not wigging out and trying to escape (not that there would be anywhere to go to on a shuttle like this!) Things were not looking good, but I would handle this like a real, genuine, certified agent of the Empire. A real, genuine, certified agent of the Empire having a mild asthma attack, perhaps. I decided to treat the whole thing as normally as possible and held out my arm as if for a shot at the doctor’s office.    
  
The needle itself barely twinged, though I was surprised to notice that Lesedi was using it to draw blood into a small capsule rather than injecting anything. She then transferred the capsule to a handheld machine and examined the readout it produced. Maybe this was some kind of immune system test? Lesedi picked up the datapad and entered something that I could not see, since the screen was turned away from me. Looking back and forth between the datapad and machine, she scrunched her brow and made a faint tongue-clicking noise. Whatever she saw did not seem to be what she had expected.    
  
“Do you remember when the last time was that you had your midi-chlorian levels tested?” Now _that_ was something I had not thought about in years. I was below the cutoff for Force-sensitivity, so why was she even looking?   
  
“Five years ago. I was tested at birth with a Force detector too, with about the same results. A little closer to the mark than average but not Force-sensitive. The only reason I got tested again was because a relative questioned the findings of the original test.”   
  
“That would have been Grand Inquisitor Tremayne, correct?” It just goes to show how out of touch I am with news about my father’s side of the family. I hadn’t even known that he was promoted again. Somebody must have given a vibro-shiv backslap to some of the higher-ups in the last few years.   
  
I shook my head. “No, it was my half-brother’s son, Isander Brin.” There was a hint of recognition in Lesedi’s brown eyes and I wondered if they were acquaintances, but she said nothing. “He’s Force-sensitive, trained from early on, and he was one of the students that Inquisitor Tremayne brought with him when he visited Shullia that year. For some reason, Isander kept sensing what he thought was a Force-sensitive and eventually traced it to me. After testing, they decided that I was not and he had been picking up on some kind of feedback due to our common genetic background. Apparently that isn’t uncommon in younger Force-sensitives.”    
  
The Junior Inquisitor looked at me with a speculative tilt to her head. “That must have been very disappointing for you.”   
  
Not really. I was twelve at the time and would have walked through fire if Mum told me it was my duty to the Empire. Nevertheless, leaving my home to train with the Inquisitors was an honor that my younger self wanted slightly less than that of having to fight a starving krayt dragon to the death. In addition, at that time I had not been entirely sure that they accepted female recruits at all. One occasionally heard some rather gruesome rumors about what might happen if the Inquisitors found a Force-sensitive that they did not want to train. There was no way I was going to say any of that to Lesedi, though.    
  
I settled for an answer that was hopefully more diplomatic. “Well, I knew about the earlier test, so I had never had any ambitions in that area. Mostly, I just was confused about why there would be a need to double-check at all.”    
  
There was something knowing about Lesedi’s expression and I had a feeling that my concerns on the matter were not as well hidden as I had intended. However, she did not comment on my motivation or appear to take offense.    
  
“The way the Force functions in individuals near the borderline of sensitivity tends to be erratic”, she said. “Re-testing with different equipment sometimes yields a higher or lower count, especially if there has been a change in the subject’s health. Do you know if there were any recent illnesses before your previous tests?”   
  
I thought about it for a minute. “My mother never said anything about my having any health issues as a newborn, so I don’t think so for the first test. The second one, yes. I was infected with Shownarri Fungus and had to have a brain abcess removed in Month 4 of that year, which would have been about … twelve weeks before the test.”    
  
That was a nightmare. Somehow the Amets family’s well became infested with the fungus that year. They shared some of their produce (washed in the contaminated water) with the neighbors, which meant the fungus ended up being spread for miles around and dozens of people were infected. It was fortunate that nobody died. I came closer to it than I like to consider.    
  
At first, it seemed like the antibiotics had worked and resolved the problem within a few days. A couple of weeks later, the infection returned with a vengeance. I have never been so miserably ill in my life, before or since. By nightfall, I was battling with a vicious fever, horrible aches and pains, cold sweat, and nausea so bad that I couldn’t keep down water. Events seemed dreamlike and I kept passing out. Mum didn’t even wait for morning before packing me into the hovercar and taking me to the hospital in Tulekahju. The next few weeks after that are fuzzy in my memory, which is probably for the best since I was disoriented, frustrated, and scared in my few moments of almost-clarity. Fortunately, the surgery to remove the abcess went well. I came out of it with a bad haircut but no lasting effects other than an interesting scar (which I only got to show off for a little while before my hair grew back over it.) No permanent harm done, but not one of my favorite childhood memories. Brain-eating fungus. Ick.    
  
“The immune system effects of the infection could certainly have influenced the difference between your childhood test scores,” said Lesedi. Difference? I hadn’t been aware that there was one. Inquisitor Tremayne had not mentioned any such thing. I wondered what she was leading towards as she entered some notes into the datapad. “And, as I mentioned before, the equipment used can affect the outcome. There tends to be a slight mismatch between the results of Force detectors and blood tests. Generally, the Force detectors are not as accurate.” No surprise there. The single Force detector that I knew of on Shullia was kept in the Tulekahju Hospital and was considered nearly useless by the staff since it had fits every time a Zeltron came within miles of the hospital. It was such a lost cause that no one had even tried to recalibrate it in years.    
  
“However, there is a large discrepancy between both of your earlier tests and the sample that I just tested,” said Lesedi. She turned the datapad around so that I could see the display. On the screen was a graph with each estimated midi-chlorian count mapped out. The first two were only a little different, the second showing a slightly lower count than the first. But today’s reading was much higher. Nowhere near the 4,000 mark that would make things _really_ hard to explain, but definitely odd when compared with the others.   
  
“That’s nearly 250 points higher than the last test. Is that even possible?” I asked, looking at the Junior Inquisitor in bewilderment.   
  
She did not reply immediately and I was unsure how to respond to the gap in conversation. There was nothing that I would have normally considered threatening about her posture or expression. In fact, she reminded me of the counselor that Vera talked me into seeing last year for all of one session (during which we covered the fact that I was fine, thank you, at varying levels of volume.) Lesedi had the same demeanor that made you want to confide in her, a relaxed but attentive pose and amiable look that gave away no sense of judgment. Her expression exuded warmth and curiosity. My earlier conversation with Zelenus and his warning about her nudged at the back of my mind. He certainly believed that there could be wrong answers here, and I wondered what those wrong answers were. What was Lesedi looking for and what did she expect to find?    
  
“It seems that it is possible, since the evidence is here in front of us. The Force detector used to test you at birth might have been defective, but I can personally vouch that the Grand Inquisitor is extremely particular about the maintenance of his scanners.” Understatement of the year, no doubt. Inquisitor Tremayne has always struck me as a man who is unusually particular about everything, down to the most minute of issues. If he were a less unnerving person, I might consider him to be a little compulsive. As it is, I’m not sure there is a proper Basic word for what he is, though “terrifying” is a good start.   
  
I nodded, not knowing quite what to say. Lesedi leaned forward and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. I was not sure whether that was meant to be a soothing gesture or a reminder of her control over the situation, but I deliberately breathed in and concentrated on relaxing. If there was one thing that Mum drilled into my head at every opportunity (well, along with such things as “pay attention to your surroundings”, “always check the power pack on your blaster”, and “don’t forget your coat, it might rain again”) it was “never let people see when you are nervous.” Of course, I never mastered it to the extent that she had, but the ghost of the old reflex remains.    
  
Gesturing at the datapad, Lesedi said, “Although your count is not on the level of a Force-user, the fluctuations in readings are unusual. A closer examination of the phenomenon might provide some insight to the workings of the Force in atypical individuals. We will get a complete workup on your health when you go through quarantine, naturally, but currently we are limited to the technology on board. As well as a basic med-scan, there are some simple tests that should help to define what we are looking at here.” Oh boy. The medical “we.” I grimly pictured spending the rest of my life as a lab vervikk, but pushed that train of thought away. It was possible that whatever condition I had would soon prove to be something simple and uninteresting.    
  
Thankfully, the tests that Lesedi ran were not really unpleasant. Many of them resembled the ones that I had been given for a few years after my brain surgery, just to check that everything was functioning normally (inasmuch as the inside of my head has ever been “normal.”) These were for basic things – checking how well I could remember chunks of information, what pitches I could hear, or how quickly my eyes tracked a light. I didn’t much care for Lesedi’s version of a balance test, which involved me trying to stand upright on a fast-moving platform that hovered on repulsorlifts and tilted at random. This was even harder than it looked and I was beginning to feel nauseous – not to mention sore in the knees and elbows – by the time Lesedi got whatever information she was seeking. Whoever decided to put some padding on the cargo bay floor has very likely saved me from more broken bones than I can count.    
  
There were a few very odd tests, ones where I had to try to guess where an image would appear on the datapad screen or which of several shapes Lesedi was viewing from the other side. I can only imagine that this was meant to measure whatever hint of Force senses I might posess. One of the tidbits of information I remember hearing when I was re-tested a few years ago is that people in the “Force-attuned” range (well below being able to use it, but closer to that level than average) can sometimes develop a hint of Force perception. I suppose that is why we are called “attuned.” To the best of my knowledge, I am about as psychic as duracrete gravel unless there are Force-users around, at which point I sometimes get that uncomfortable static effect.    
  
Lesedi’s unruffled expression told me nothing about how my performance might compare to what was expected. The only thing that she reacted to was when she reversed the shapes exercise and tried to guess what I was seeing. Within a few minutes, she shook her head and turned off the datapad. “You are not deliberately blocking.” There was a mild question in her tone.    
  
“No, I’m not trying to do anything like that,” I said. However, the conversation had reminded me of an old memory and I added, “But Isander reported that he ran into some sort of barrier when he tried to read my emotions. Grand Inquisitor Tremayne mentioned that there was something unclear about the impressions that he sensed as well, but said that it probably had to do with the brain surgery.” At least I remembered his new title. If he picks up any more High Mighty Magnificents, he’s going to need another Star Destroyer to accommodate them all.   
  
Lesedi looked thoughtful but only said, “That is… very strange. I will be interested to see what the medcenter has to say when we arrive.” So will I. And then maybe the issue can finally be over and done with.   
  
After the prep time and mission on Dachat, which had then been followed by nearly four hours of attempting to go over my perceptive abilities with a fine-toothed comb, I was tired and ready to drop. It turned out that there were also some standardized tests that I needed to take for Karkaryss, but to my relief Lesedi seemed to recognize that I needed a break and dismissed me.    
  
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
Information on midi-chlorians was suppressed during the Emperor’s reign, but this story assumes that their existence has become less secret since then. Lydia has heard of them because the subject came up when she was re-tested for Force potential.    
  
The [Force detectors](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_detector) mentioned are gadgets of Imperial design that are used to identify Force-sensitives. Unlike the blood tests (ex: the one Qui-Gon does to find Anakin’s count in TPM), they work on proximity rather than needing a sample.   
  
[Vervikks](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vervikk) are rat-like animals.   
  
[Zeltrons](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zeltron) are one of several species that have specific Force-related senses or abilities but not (usually) full-blown Jedi potential. 


	9. Half-baked Lightsabers and Other Challenges (Month 1, Day 22 - Part 2)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 22 – Part 2**   
  
The _Draigon_ exited hyperspace for a few moments yesterday, which I think was probably due to being stopped at an Interdictor checkpoint. We’re now past the outermost boundaries and beginning to approach the more inhabited fringes of the Deep Core. The _Draigon_ will be making planetfall tomorrow for a few hours, though I’m scheduled to remain with the ship. It is a little disappointing, since I am starting to long for a change of scenery again, but at least there will be time for me to catch up with my extra studies.   


  
  
I slept like the dead the night after Dachat. If my alarm had not been set, I might have slept right through the next day for good measure. As it was, I crawled out of bed “bright” and so-very-early the next morning and took my tests. There were a few things that I struggled with (especially the political knowledge test, which had a number of questions relating to local astrography and politics in the Deep Core), but most of the material was not too difficult. The technological tests were more extensive than the ones we received back home, but I always did quite a bit of technology research out of class and it paid off.   
  
Once that was finished, Lesedi took me back to the cargo bay to assess my physical fitness and fighting skills. It seemed strange that this would fall under her responsibility, but then again maybe evaluating new students was part of her normal duties. Let’s just say that it was a good thing that I had not been leading the life of a couch keebada on Shullia. Whatever their other expertise may be, Inquisitor trainees apparently can do things to the garden variety push-up or crunch that have got to be illegal under any planetary system’s rules of warfare.   
  
And as for the fighting, well – I have never been so grateful to Ahnjai Rahmma for the hours he spent sparring with me. It used to leave me so discouraged and angry that Mum insisted on that, since I was not a felinoid and would never be able to really learn his combat style. My short human limbs and less-flexible spine just could not begin to imitate the movements of a being who was built more along the lines of a Corellian sand panther. Surely between Mum and Zain and the self-defense teachers at school, there was no need to have Ahnjai wipe the floor with me on a tri-weekly basis. Funny how you learn the value of your experiences later.   
  
It wasn’t until the invasion that I really understood what I had learned from those lessons – the ability to dodge blows at lightning speed (far faster than anything a more human-like teacher could have thrown at me), the necessity to get back up _immediately_ no matter how winded I might be, and (the most difficult of all) how to lose badly and still hold myself together. That last lesson stood me in good stead during Lesedi’s evaluation because I lost quite thoroughly every time I fought her. Armed, unarmed, it hardly mattered. If that had been me from a few years ago, I may very well have lost my temper completely and done something unwise. Pity nobody knows where Ahnjai is these days, since I owe him a five-star nerfsteak and a wholehearted apology for being such a reluctant student.   
  
At any rate, I survived, and have continued to survive the additional sparring sessions of the last couple of days. Lesedi wears her pleasant attitude like an Enso’s coolth suit. It _never_ comes off, even when she’s turning me into paste. I almost wish she would yell once in a while. I’m used to being yelled at when I fight. Mum was a champion yeller, Ahnjai sounded like the return of the Great Nexu of Entropy, Zain had barked himself hoarse at generations of the Imperial Exploration Corps, and I think the physical education and martial arts teachers at school had to pass a volume test to even qualify. With Lesedi, I don’t know quite where I stand. Every move I make is observed with the same bright-eyed interest, whether it fails or succeeds.   
  
The _Draigon_ is stocked with a nearly endless supply of training weapons. Some of them seem more reasonable than others – the practicality of a vibro-ax is a bit questionable for most people. Nevertheless, Lesedi has had me try nearly all of the weapons at least briefly. She even had me try out some sort of low-powered lightsaber. That was interesting, if very frustrating. The blade is completely weightless. It sounds good when you’ve been struggling to heft a vibro-ax for the last forty minutes, until you realize how ridiculously difficult it is to maintain control over the direction of the weapon.   
  
Given the amount of minor burns that I managed to give myself within a couple of hours of solo practice, I think it is safe to say that Zelenus saved my bacon (at least temporarily) by diverting Lesedi’s attention. She was planning to have me try dueling with her that afternoon. Judging from what an accidental bump can do, a solid hit from one of those half-baked lightsabers wouldn’t kill you but would make you wish it had. Luckily for me, Zelenus came in to talk to Lesedi during lunch. He looked like death warmed over, frozen, and warmed over again. It must be a pain to have that kind of reaction to hyperspace travel. They were at a distance, so I didn’t catch exactly what he said to her. She nodded reluctantly and called me over.   
  
“There have been some new developments that I need to look into, so I’m going to have to turn your practice over to the other students for a few days,” she said with sincere regret. Of course, she would much rather have spent the day turning me into well-done barbecue.   
  
I tried not to look overly relieved as I handed over my training weapon. At least there would be a few days’ reprieve.   
  
On the way back to my room, Zelenus caught up to me. “Here, you need to review this,” he said, handing me a datachip. “It’s the recordings from the security cams on Dachat. We review the recordings to make sure of the accuracy of the reports and analyze where our performance could improve. Stars know there’s always something. Umm, I’m afraid there’s a lot to do since we took you along before you could be processed as a new student.” Sadly, he wasn’t joking. I was up so late that night out of determination to finish all the details, it was early ship’s-morning by the time I gave in and slept. On the other hand, I managed to save some holo captures of Zelenus with his unique hat, which I think was well worth the effort.   
  
  
For the last couple days Bramer has been keeping me running from dawn until dusk – not that you can tell the difference on a ship, which is starting to really mess with my sense of time. I need to adapt to the physical training regimen if I’m going to make a smooth transition into the University, but there are some academic materials that require attention as well. Mostly I have to study the specifics on the Second Imperium and its formation, which is information that was unavailable at home.   
  
Shullia and the other worlds of the Neredda system belong to the Nebula Command, a title which sounds much more impressive than the reality. Along with the Adrastú and Salkarú systems, the Neredda system is located in a hard-to-navigate area sandwiched between the Torch Nebula and the edge of the Parmic sector. The Torch Nebula is a spectacular diffuse nebula with a mainly violet-red coloration and deep indigo-blue swirling highlights. Its beauty draws tourists to admire the view from Shownar over in the Parmic, but it also messes with starships’ sensors something awful in the systems that are nearer to all that pretty glowing gas and dust.   
  
Although there are over a dozen inhabited worlds in the Nebula Command, the total population is still not very high by galactic standards. Our autonomy from the New Republic and trading clout with the rest of the Imperial groups is mainly dependent on the Nebula Fleet’s control of the usable hyperspace routes. There is little incentive to risk traveling the spacelanes unless you have the exact coordinates of the best routes and the proper identification to show at the Interdictor checkpoints. Needless to say, the coordinates are not given out to just anybody (and if I ever find out who gave the coordinates to those Hutt-slime pirates, they had better give up on the known galaxy and start making for Companion Cresh.)   
  
There has sometimes been talk of joining the Bastion-centered Empire, but issues of practicality have kept the Nebula Command worlds from strengthening their alliance to any other offshoot of the Empire. One problem is the New Republic’s possible reaction. All the abnormalities created by the Torch Nebula make us somewhat difficult to attack from outside, but things could still get ugly fast if they suddenly perceived our little backwater as a serious threat. Another spanner in the works is the issue of being separated from outside administrators by long distances due to our inconvenient location. Communication between the outside and the Nebula systems is spotty at best. Altogether, the situation adds up to one big headache every time the governors and sub-governors get to talking.   
  
It is an awkward position from which to deal with Imperials outside the Nebula systems and there has been some tension with the Second Imperium in particular for the last couple of years. Pellaeon’s diplomats insist that the Imperium is a non-legitimate rogue faction. Meanwhile, those from the Second Imperium take verbal potshots at the Imperials from Bastion and claim that they have shown weakness by making a peace treaty with the New Republic. I can see both sides but mostly admire my mother for not pistol-whipping the ambassadors upside the head with her holdout blaster. It must have been tough. Anyway, the Nebula systems haven’t been privy to much detailed information on the Second Imperium due to the political mess and thus I have some catching up to do when it comes to local history. Oh well, who needs sleep?   
  


**Notes** :   
  
The [keebada](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Keebada) is some sort of fruit that Hutts enjoy rather than a potato-type vegetable. All the potato-counterparts seem to have bland names.   
  
[Ahnjai Rahmma](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ahnjai_Rahmma) is yet another character from _Galaxy Guide 9_. He was Inquisitor Tremayne’s reluctant-but-indebted bodyguard somewhere around the Rebellion era. How he ended up working for Elena instead and where he disappeared to some time ago is a mystery to Lydia.   
  
Members of the [Enso](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Enso) species are adapted to extreme cold and have to wear [coolth suits](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Coolth_suit) to survive in warmer climates.   
  
[Companion Cresh](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Companion_Cresh) is the most distant of the three satellite galaxies orbiting the main Star Wars galaxy.   
  
The situation of the Imperial factions that existed after Endor is complicated since nearly all considered themselves to represent the real Empire, but the two groups from canon that are mentioned here are the main [ Imperial Remnant ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Remnant) run by Pellaeon and the [ Second Imperium ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Imperium).


	10. Triaen Odon (Month 1, Day 23)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 23**   
  
Countdown to getting out of this cramped shuttle: only 4 days! On the other hand, I’ll be spending another two weeks in quarantine once we arrive. They’re serious about preventing offworld diseases from making it to Karkaryss. The Outer Rim has a reputation for spawning viruses and bacteria that Coreworlders are unusually vulnerable to – though I have to add that we Rimworlders are often even worse off immunity-wise, coming from more isolated planets with lower populations. Most of my immunizations have already been done, but there will probably be a few more for local illnesses.    
  
There will also likely be some last-minute processing and questions and of course, the inevitable paperwork. Though I already attended some interviews with their recruiters before leaving home, the Second Imperium will probably want things double-checked. Due to my being from the Nebula Command rather than their own systems, it will probably take a while to straighten things out. Still, two weeks should be more than enough time. The quarantine center has a nice exercise area according to Bramer, so at least I won’t have to spend the whole time going stir-crazy like I was early in the flight. At any rate, I can’t wait to get through all of that and start attending classes. So close and yet so far.    
  
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve mostly been training with Bramer for the last couple of days. First thing in the morning, we start with stretches and calisthenics. Then we progress to practicing various exercises and fighting moves that are taught at Karkaryss, mainly focusing on the ones that I struggled with during my tests. A lot of the combat moves are influenced by Teräs Käsi, which is a fighting style that I had never heard of before this week. There is something familiar about some of the strikes and stances, which remind me of moves that I saw my mother practicing. For whatever reason (probably because I was too inexperienced back then), she never taught me how to do them myself, so they are still new to me in practice. A few of the instructors on Karkaryss are trained in Teräs Käsi and have developed a fighting style combining its basics with those of the more standard Imperial unarmed combat methods.    
  
I still get trounced most of the time, though not as regularly as with Lesedi. Bramer is a second-year student twice my size and has had a fair amount of physical training by now. On the other hand, he isn’t an Inquisitor in training. The “normal” students don’t specialize in combat skills to the extent that Lesedi seems to have done. Bramer is no more comfortable with the vibro-ax or the zhaboka than I am. He is well-practiced in the areas that are emphasized in his courses, such as unarmed combat and target shooting.    
  
Speaking of target practice, we usually end the morning with a session. Obviously, we can’t use real blasters on a small ship for fear of all sorts of disasters, but there are holoblasters linked into a projector system that also creates holotargets. The computer in the system records all our hits and misses. It also tracks reaction time and compares performance to previous sessions. Mum had a similar setup installed at home, though she had also done some pretty heavy tinkering of her own.    
  
The routine has been that we train together in the morning, while in the afternoon I do various exercises before going back to my quarters to study the new materials Bramer gave me (a stack of datacards all loaded to the brim with Second Imperium background information.) Bramer usually wanders off with datapad in hand after lunch, already absorbed in tweaking the code to some program or other. He says he is doing an additional sub-specialization with the Tech department, which sounds like it would make for a very busy schedule when combined with a full load of main courses. No wonder he seems wired all the time; the poor guy practically lives on caff.   
  
It’s pretty much me and Bramer most of the time. I have seen no trace of Inquisitor Ombyrne since leaving Dachat, nor has the mysterious Inquisitor Antilles surfaced. That’s fine by me – Lesedi seems all right in her way, but one of her is more than enough. She showed up for a brief sparring session yesterday morning, but most of her time is occupied with whatever information she was given the other day. Zelenus rarely stumbles out of his quarters and looks as nauseous and tired as ever when he does, so we have not talked much. At first Bramer was going to have him take on some of the exercise and sparring, but he soon decided that Zelenus would be more of a hindrance than a help in his exhausted state. Odon has made himself scarce as well, though today I did see him practicing in the cargo bay around noon.    
  
At first I didn’t notice him, since I was distracted with blocking Bramer’s strikes and trying to get past his guard. Something at the edge of my vision began flickering and I dodged around my sparring partner, trying to get a better view. Even though it was just a practice session, there was no guarantee that Bramer hadn’t drafted someone else in to catch me off guard if they could. No sense in allowing a new student to lack alertness.    
  
However, from my new vantage point I could see that the newcomer was at the far end of the cargo bay and making no moves in our direction. Instead, he was busy obliterating a series of holotargets using an arm-mounted weapon that shot a series of tiny metal plates sparkling with static. Rather than continuing onward from the targets to hit the wall, the disc-shaped items immediately morphed in shape to something more like a rounded triangular wedge and spun back to reconnect with the launching device.    
  
Though I was fascinated, there was no opportunity to observe more until Bramer and I stopped for a brief water break some time later. I could see no obvious means by which the odd weapon was fired and had to assume that it was responsive to slight muscle movements or to signals from some sort of neural implant. Either way, the target sequence he had chosen required a staggering level of accuracy and speed. As he moved to aim at one of the holotargets, I finally identified the man as Odon. From a distance it could just as easily have been Inquisitor Ombyrne, who was of a similar height and build. However, the dark hair and rectangular jawline gave him away.    
  
Now that I recognized him, I remembered the peculiar not-a-blaster weapon that I had noticed on his arm during the retrieval on Dachat. A clearer view left me no wiser as to what the weapon might actually be called. Whatever it was, Odon was far beyond skilled with it. Where Lesedi fought with predatory cleverness and brutal strikes, and Bramer and I bore the marks of our different brands of self-defense training in our no-nonsense movements, Odon was clearly an artist. He twisted, ducked, leapt and dodged with the easy grace of an ilakari playing in a mountain stream. One could think that he was sacrificing practicality in favor of display – and yet every shot he made connected perfectly.    
  
Shaking my head in astonishment, I turned to Bramer and asked, “So, is he a Force-user too? What is that weapon he’s using?”    
  
“Not that I know about, and nothing I’ve ever heard of.” He took another drink from his canteen and when he looked up again it was with a concerned expression. “Honestly, I thought Tamir was exaggerating. But no, you really do have a knack for finding the wrong things to be curious about. Of all the people…”    
  
Bramer returned the canteen to his carry pack, moving with ritualistic precision. Swear to the Celestials, everything that man owns is kept immaculate. It’s like he was abandoned in the wilderness and raised to adulthood by a band of roving feral drill sergeants.    
  
“You know of Ysanne Isard, right?” he asked in a low voice. “Keep in mind that it might be a load of bantha feathers, but rumor has it that Triaen Odon is her cousin. One of them, anyway. Not sure if I give it credit or not; on the one hand there is definitely a passing resemblance to the other Isards, but on the other hand it’s never been officially confirmed in my hearing. He’s in the Enforcement Operations department and has not been in many of my classes, so I don’t know much about his story.”    
  
Bramer paused and shifted position on the bench, leaning back and crossing his arms over one knee. Something in his eyes didn’t match his brief smile, instead speaking of distance and unpleasant memories. “Like I said, it’s unconfirmed. People pass around quite a few complete falsehoods, especially about the students who aren’t known as members of important families. There was a mini-aristocracy in the Deep Core during the old days. It’s not as much of a force to be reckoned with anymore, but the young ones still resent talented outsiders and the locals still love a good gossip. All I do know is that his score in weapons training is second only to that of some of the Junior Inquisitors.”   
  
“Oh.” I blinked. There was definitely some kind of resentment in the older student’s attitude towards the local aristos, but I didn’t grudge him that. After my educational career in Tulekahju, I probably featured on the “assassinate if we ever get Great Uncle Poobah’s inheritance” lists of at least a dozen members of various planets’ exiled minor nobility. Some of them could be a real pain in the afterburners. At home, Vera was pretty well the only person corresponding to that category who I would trust to watch my back – and she only counted if you were (unlike our largely Rhinnalian, Tepasi and Eriaduan crop of annoyances) willing to count a Human/Sephi hybrid. However, it was a detail in Bramer’s phrasing that caught my ear and left me nearly speechless.   
  
“Oh stars…” I whispered. Bramer watched my lack of composure, seeming torn between amusement and anxiety. “Are you really saying… there are _more_ of them?” My imagination conjured up a – I’m not sure what you would call it, maybe a pack, a pride, a murder? – of Ysannes and I shuddered at the idea.   
  
Though I never had the pleasure of meeting her personally, I heard plenty about old Iceheart from my mother. Being the director of Imperial Intelligence didn’t win her any love from the Imperial Security Bureau. From what Mum described, the two groups had overlapping responsibilities and worked together but nearly always held each other in suspicion. Still, the level of detail and sheer resentment always made me think there might have been some kind of personal feud between her and Isard.    
  
It wasn’t like Mum to speak ill of her current or former superiors in the Imperial government. And if she did, it wasn’t what I would call scathing criticism. Just for comparison purposes, she considered Darth Vader to be “harsh but fair” (do I really need to say more?), Governor Xacall to be “unpleasant” (he very nearly halved the population of the Salkarú system before he was executed), Abran Balfour to be “somewhat lacking in security-consciousness” (the Rebels stole his undies – twice), and Osvald Teshik to be “slightly jittery” (others say he was suffering from advanced Cybernetic Psychosis.) Mum never said a bad word about Armand Isard, Ysanne’s father and predecessor in the Directorship. In fact, she didn’t even seem grudging in her respect for the man.    
  
So it did stick in my mind that she referred to Ysanne by phrases such as “bloodsucking, Maw-spawned sociopath” and “venomous, paranoid kraytling with the soul of a kouhun.” This was coming from a woman who had been known to bring presumably grown-up Moffs to the verge of tears just by giving them the evil eye. Okay, so the Moff was Balfour. The point still stands. To make that kind of an impression on my mother, Isard must have been pretty frightening.    
  
“Okay, bad question. I had _no_ idea,” I said with emphasis. Though I would have loved to ask about what was up with the passenger list for this ship (at last count we had a reclusive shuttle captain, myself, two Inquisitors, an injured mystery man, a possible Isard, and two other relatively inexperienced students out and about in the galaxy), I held back. After all, even I knew better than that. We moved back to more neutral topics such as the quarantine process that I will soon be going through and various facts about new student life. Bramer was kind enough to warn me of a few of the common pitfalls awaiting my first few days. Only time will tell if some of said warnings were pranks in themselves, but I think he was being honest.   
  
Some of it was common-sense advice, such as to rest up during quarantine so that I wouldn’t be entirely sleep-deprived while adjusting to my classes and homework. Other tips made me do a double-take.   
  
“Since you’re doing Tech, it’s possible you’ll end up doing some training in the aquatic section of the Blue Complex. While I’m sure you wouldn’t do this, for the medics’ sake I have to say it: don’t flip out over the sharks.”   
  
“Right.” I looked at him skeptically and prepared for the punchline. It didn’t come.   
  
Bramer said, “The lower levels are filled with water to simulate undersea conditions. If you happen to study monitoring techniques for underwater vehicles like I do, you will have to practice how to dive and how to set them on the target craft. To make the environment more realistic, there is a semi-permeable force field leading to the ocean. Various species of animals and plants are allowed to enter the training facility. It helps us learn to recognize and deal with some of the less dangerous distractions we might encounter in the water.”   
  
“Like sharks,” I said, laughing with disbelief.   
  
He smiled. “You should have started earlier, then you would get to see some of the really interesting things that got in before they set the species parameters. There was a lancer shrimp that got in as a larva. It grew overnight and nearly tore apart the whole place before the facility security officers brought it down. It seemed like it took nearly half an hour of peppering that thing with plasma before it finally gave up the ghost. Now that’s scary!”    
  
“You were there?”    
  
“Oh yes. First time in the water. My poor trainer had to just about drag me back in after things quieted down. Really, it’s always the things you don’t expect that will get you. The only person who has ever died in an exercise just happened to brush against a tiny little invertebrate that was horribly toxic. The sharks they let come in are either too small to do much damage or are not very aggressive towards humans. The thing is, if you panic and flail around right in their faces and your hand happens to end up in their mouth – well, nobody can fix stupid, you see?” He shrugged.    
  
“I realize you don’t seem particularly airheaded, but people get strange around large animals sometimes,” Bramer said. “Especially sharks. Most people take it well after they make it through their first few dives and realize they aren’t going to be eaten by anything. But there’s always one who can’t handle it. Either they have full-blown panic attacks or they underestimate the animals and try to antagonize them. One of the medics is a good friend of mine and I have to listen to him rant every time the newbies get nibbled. So please, for my sake and his, don’t do it. The “shark kibble” nickname for new students is supposed to be figurative, not literal!”   
  
I swallowed and nodded, agreeing in a slightly hoarse voice. “Okay, no kibble for me. Thanks.” Right. Swimming with sharks. Big sharks. Vera would love this, and by love this I mean that she would run away screaming. And I would not blame her one bit. So why am I excited for it? I think my confinement in this flying srideeni can is messing with more than my sense of time.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
[Teräs Käsi](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ter%C3%A4s_K%C3%A4si) is a martial art that originated with the [Followers of Palawa](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Followers_of_Palawa) and was practiced by at least some Imperials such as [Arden Lyn ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Arden_Lyn) and [Nova Stihl ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nova_Stihl).    
  
The [zhaboka](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zhaboka) is a traditional Zabrak weapon that resembles the double-bladed lightsaber wielded by Darth Maul but has regular metal blades.    
  
[Holotargets](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Holotarget) are three-dimensional images like the holograms used for communication, but are tweaked to be used for combat training purposes.   
  
The ilakari is not a canon species, but its name is based on the [rakali](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakali), a slightly otter-like swimming rodent from Australia. The rakali is also known as the Australian Water Rat.   
  
The [Celestials](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Celestial) were a long-vanished spacefaring civilization believed to be responsible for various bizarre phenomena such as the artificially-constructed Corellian system.    
  
[Abran Balfour](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Abran_Balfour) was a Moff during the Rebellion era. Elena Shelvay had been sent to watch him because he was so deeply incompetent and lackadaisical about the Rebel activity in his sector that he was actually suspected of treason. There was a [popular song](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moff_Balfour%27s_Lament_\(Tapmint_Surprise\)) about his antics. And yes, the Rebels somehow got a hold of his underpants.    
  
[Osvald Teshik](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Osvald_Teshik) was one of the Imperial Grand Admirals. He suffered massive injuries in battle and ended up with a mostly cybernetic body. There is no clear evidence in canon that he had [Cybernetic Psychosis](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Cybernetic_Psychosis) (a psychological illness experienced by some cyborgs), but he did report having mystical visions of the galaxy’s past and future. 


	11. Unsound Sleep (Month 1, Day 24)

** 41 AE, Month 1, Day 24   
  
** Nearly fell out of bed during a night terror (or whatever it is that I get) at an uncivilized hour and now I can’t sleep. Blargh. I had been hoping that those were over for good. It’s been months since the last one. They started some time around all the mess that happened two years ago. The weeks around the invasion were a blur punctuated by outstanding bad events. There was no time to notice how I was sleeping until the aftermath. I didn’t really understand why I was exhausted all the time until Zain pointed out that I lunged halfway out of bed screaming at least once on an average night. Normally, I fell back asleep and forgot everything by morning.    
  
I’m fairly sure they’re night terrors and not nightmares. There’s no real imagery or anything associated with them that I can recall. What there is is a lot of flailing and yelling, according to any unfortunate bleary-eyed witnesses the next day. Also, for some reason I stopped having dreams of any kind a long time ago. I can’t remember a clear dream or nightmare of any kind from the last several years. It’s funny, because I used to get terrible nightmares all the time. They were always those “being chased” dreams, the ones where you can’t move fast enough and something is right behind you. But I could never see what was chasing me, even if I managed to turn around. Or I could see it, but what I saw didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a figure or shape that you could see.    
  
Instead, everything would look completely normal and the other people in the dream would be going about their business while this thing hovered within meters of them. It was like a hole in the fabric of reality. I’ll admit that sounds like something from one of those ridiculous spec-fic time travel holonovels that Rhajani and I used to read. However, there was nothing silly about this thing. It felt malicious and gave off such unrelenting cold that I would often wake up with a headache, feeling as though the iciness of its presence had somehow invaded my skull. Sometimes there seemed to be more than one of the dream things but I thought of them as pieces of a unit – like colony insects in a hive or the blades of a single snapgrass plant.    
  
Eesh, I haven’t thought about that in forever. There are a lot of things I miss about the old days back home, but that one can go fly with the nerfs. Nasty as the night terrors are, at least I don’t have to remember much about them. Usually it’s possible to go back to sleep, though tonight I’m having trouble. Too much anxiety about all the new changes in my life. Maybe that’s why I had the night terror in the first place. Or it could be because of all the times I’ve stayed up late doing paperwork or studying this week. In which case, I suppose when I get settled in on Karkaryss I had better buy everyone who sleeps near me earplugs. And crash-pad the floor. Joy.   
  
We must be landing for the expedition that some of the other passengers are going to undertake. I can hear and feel the vibrations that come from the shuttle entering a planet’s atmosphere. I’m not sure exactly where we are, since it’s not something anyone needed to tell me. Based on the time we’ve been traveling and the places we’ve already passed through, it could be Hakassi or Thoadeye. Thoadeye sounds like an interesting place with all the elaborate fashions and bizarre droids.    
  
The _Draigon’s_ engines are quiet now. We’re planetside somewhere. There was supposed to be a landing late yesterday. The shuttle must have taken a longer detour. One thing I really hate about these sleep disturbances, regardless of what they are, is how vulnerable they make me feel. Most of the time, I’m thrilled and eager to be heading into the unknown. But after the unpleasant awakening, I feel off-kilter and it’s very difficult to keep from imagining the most childish and fearful scenarios. We could be in the middle of a crowded city or alone on an uninhabited rock. I don’t know who is leaving the ship or when they will be back. It’s hard not to imagine that anyone or anything could be waiting outside, or even trying to get in. The slightest little noises keep making me jump.    
  
I think I’ll pull out the datacards and start studying the information on Thoadeye. No sleeping is going to get done here. It’s not even “night” anymore, it’s nearly “morning”!    
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
The night terrors Lydia describes are based on the [real-world sleep disorder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror) of the same name. 

Thoadeye (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Thoadeye_system>)


	12. Searching the Ship (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 2)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 2**   
  
Since my search had turned up nothing in the pilot’s area (nor was there any sign of trouble in the barely lived-in room nearby that I assumed belonged to Barrett), I went back to carefully opening each door and checking every room in the ship. This took a lot longer than it would have if I hadn’t been worried about alerting intruders to my presence. At least I had my blaster again – the items in the ship’s locker had been untouched and I had gladly taken the opportunity to bring it along. Nothing seemed out of place anywhere in the _Draigon_ ’s interior rooms. Or at least, if anything was out of place I could not recognize the signs. There were no long-term residents on the shuttle apart from Captain Barrett, so most of the quarters were very clean.    
  
There was no way in all the stars that I would enter any of the Inquisitors’ rooms uninvited unless I absolutely had to. Lesedi had always headed off towards the aft area, so I left that section of the ship alone after listening at each door. Silence, as I expected. If any of them were alive and trapped, it should have been impossible not to know about it. Inquisitors have ways of making themselves heard. Checking the other rooms for fellow passengers seemed to take forever but that was due to nerves more than anything. Neither Odon nor Bramer had left anything out of their hyper-organized clutter containment systems and I could not tell who was the proud owner of their very (very) shiny temporary living spaces. It was immediately clear that their rooms were not harboring anything out of the ordinary. Not so much as a dust mooka between them.   
  
Zelenus seemed to have brought along everything he owned and allowed the mess to congregate on every surface. I could tell the quarters were his because of the algae tanks – there was some experiment he was working on for a class and Bramer had mentioned it before. Bramer was a man who disapproved of algae, with the reluctant exception of the stuff used to recycle ships’ air. Even though it wasn’t for curiosity’s sake, it felt a bit more personal than was comfortable to see a messy room and I backed out soon. If there had been a fight in there, nobody would ever know. And if somebody was hidden under the algae tanks, it would take a loading droid to excavate them.    
  
Apart from the last-resort options of the Inquisitors’ lairs and the deep dark civilizations breeding in Zelenus’s old socks, there was only one place left to look. The expanse of the cargo bay seemed much larger in the dark. This was where intruders would have had to enter the ship, if they did so at all. I crouched down by the doorway, listening for the slightest sounds from inside. The door itself had been left open, and I felt a chill of fear travel down my neck at the perfectly normal sight. An open door didn’t mean someone had broken in, but I wanted more and more to turn right around and find some place to hide.    
  
Ridiculous, especially since I had dealt with more obviously dangerous things before, and even been in a few outright fights for my life. Actually won two-and-a-half without the intervention of rescuers, too. Don’t laugh so hard, datapad. Half counts when your opponent has toe-claws the size of butcher knives and kicks like a gualama in a thunderstorm. The fact that I missed the appearance of his Nikto pirate buddy while trying to dodge the Toenails of Death was pretty inevitable. Grania later told me that I was probably the first patient in the history of my homeworld to be treated for a Tiss’shar mauling and a vibro-sword lodged in the shoulder in one go. By the local veterinarian. I felt so special. All right, so there was some reason for concern about my ability to avoid trouble – especially now that I was far from my home ground and wouldn’t have Rhajani around to come and sharpshoot the stardust out of my attackers this time.   
  
Liquid glistened on the floor of the cargo bay and I moved forward hesitantly, worried about an ambush and halfway expecting to find carnage. The few details picked up by the night-visor were difficult to judge. I spooked myself several times with the passage of my own shadow between the faint glow of the air system readout in the corner and the shimmering trail of fluid. My own breathing and heartbeat seemed much too loud.    
  
As I drew closer, the reason for the goop on the floor became clear. Not blood, but something almost as disturbing. It was a trail of bacta fluid that had spilled over the edge of an opened tank. I checked my memory of the other day and felt my breath catch. I wanted to be wrong, but was certain that was where we had left Isurus after Dachat. There was no believable way he could have done this himself. The tank had no internal controls other than the emergency signal and even if he were yet another Force-user, there was no way he could have climbed out and gone for a walk. People with burns and blood loss and partial leg amputations couldn’t do that sort of thing, even if they were blessed with “magical” parasites. It wasn’t physically possible.    
  
I followed the path of bacta towards the main loading area. Here and there I could just barely make out tracks from at least two different pairs of boots. The larger pair probably belonged to Barrett or one of our other male passengers, since the treadmarks were more similar to those on shoes used for Imperial working uniforms. The others were slightly smaller (though probably also from a male if made by a human) and looked like they belonged to a different type of footwear with deeper treads – possibly something designed for wilderness trekking. The specialized gripping devices used on ship-maintenance shoes didn’t seem to be there, though it was hard to tell. The tracks were smeared and indistinct as though the person had been struggling to balance here and there – carrying Isurus, I thought. At least that made more sense than him walking off on his own. The “Imperial” shoe marks overlaid the mystery boots in several places. Pursuing the others?    
  
Whatever had happened, there was some kind of trouble here. Nearer to the exit, the trail became even more chaotic with bacta spattered all over. A gooey person-sized puddle lay in one corner and I could only assume that the mystery intruder had dropped or laid down Isurus there. The floor was scored with burns and scratches that had not been there before today. I knew that floor intimately, seeing as the ground was where I spent a good percentage of my sparring sessions. There was a faint acrid smell in the air.    
  
Finally getting a look at the door to the loading ramp made me break my up-to-then careful silence with a groan of frustration. Someone had opened the small external access hatch and sprayed sealant foam through onto the edges of the door and the control panel, then finished up by closing the hatch and spraying that as well. I sniffed at the orange foam. Durable industrial sealant. Stang, blast, and barking gundarks in a hydrocleaner. That door was the only one onboard designed to be able to open without electrical power in an emergency. Depending on the exact mixture, it could be anywhere from hours to months before the seal would weaken enough to be broken. The sealant was a fairly common type, easy to transport and common on ships. No telling whether it had been applied by some nameless bad guys to keep me in (forever!) or by one of the _Draigon_ ’s passengers to protect the ship and its contents.    
  
As I leaned back against the wall and struggled to quiet my reaction to being locked in, I couldn’t help but wonder who in the galaxy would go to such trouble to – as far as I could tell – quietly and painstakingly break into our shuttle just to kidnap an injured man from a bacta tank. Bizarre. My immediate suspicion was that it was something to do with whoever (or whatever) had taken a chunk out of poor Isurus in the first place. But the kind of expertise and _obsession_ it would take to successfully trail our shuttle through one of the nastiest hyperspace routes in the galaxy, all to recapture someone they had nearly torn apart already… that was downright disturbing.    
  
No matter what had happened, being taken out of the bacta couldn’t have been good for Isurus. He wouldn’t last long without the extra support provided by the medicine and life support systems. If he was still alive at all, he must be scared out of his wits. The strange cry that I had heard on Dachat before meeting the group echoed in my memory and made me shiver. Now that I thought about it, there was something familiar about that sound, but I could not identify it to save my life. Well, that was just going to have to bother me forever.   
  
What I at first mistook for a dead spider hanging off the side of the loading ramp control panel turned out to be the powerless body of the little droid that had accompanied Bramer and Zelenus on Dachat. The gripping pincers at the tips of its forelegs remained fixed to the edge of the panel, apparently trapped in the moment when the machine had been disabled. Cautious prodding provoked no signs of life and there was no response when I used the small magnetic tools from my kit to gently loosen the droid’s feet and remove it from the panel.    
  
If I had to be trapped in a silent and hopefully empty ship, at least maybe I could gather a little forensic evidence from the little guy. That might at least give me some hints as to whether I should leap out blasting or stand by politely when and if anyone tried to get back in the ship. I could of course hide, but there are a limited number of hiding places on a _Sigma_ and sooner or later I would be found. Very embarrassing if the finder were a friendly face. Or, alternatively, Inquisitor Ombyrne the Choke-Happy.    
  
By now, I was pretty certain that I had the ship to myself. Nevertheless, I found myself creeping back to my quarters and glancing over my shoulder every other step. It was uncomfortable to think that there had been a life-and-death struggle onboard and I had snored my way right through it. Exhaustion: 1, sensory awareness: 0. It wouldn’t be the first time. Without anyone to shake me out of my slumber, I would have slept right through quite a few things: the earthquake of ’32, the time the Meurics’ tusk cats dragged down a feral anooba outside my window, the distant sounds of the first attack made by Slone’s pirates on Tulekahju…    
  
After hanging some sheets around the door to my room on the off chance that there were still others prowling the ship, I turned on the old datapad’s screen for light and set to work on examining the droid. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, but I already knew that. The access panel for programming and maintenance was tiny and it took nearly an hour to locate. Fortunately, I had a retrieval datascanner that I had brought as an extra backup in case of the catastrophic demise of whatever (non-busted, functional) datapad I bought on Karkaryss. Unfortunately, the results came back as gibberish when accessed through a persnickety busted datapad. Gaaaah. And it looked like such an expensive droid too. Hopefully only the memory was damaged. While I was a little wary of causing further problems with my prying, I decided to attempt to recharge the machine. It was possible that the droid might have the ability to interpret its own data where my outdated datapad could not.    
  
While the droid was hooked up to the recharger, I took the time to pack a small bag of traveling supplies just in case I had to exit the ship and run. Ration bars (Granite Slug Crunch, yum yum), glowrod, extra power pack for the blaster, water canteen, hydration tablets, light jacket, small medkit (should have brought that the first time, what was I thinking?), a few tools that looked useful, and the fake ID that I had been given for the Dachat trip. It occurred to me as I stood staring at the bursting contents of the bag that my packing skills could probably use some work. Surely it wasn’t all necessary.   
  
My heart lurched when I heard a soft clink from the corner of the room. I jumped up and assumed a defensive position, then had to laugh when I saw that it was only the droid untangling itself from the charger. Evidently it felt revived enough and wasn’t going to sit still any longer. Too late, I realized that the droid was making an escape. It scurried out the doorway and vanished into the darkness of the shuttle’s interior. I cursed, pulled the night-visor back down over my eyes, and followed, mentally kicking myself for letting the machine out of my sight.    
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
[Mookas](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mooka) are fluffy little domesticated animals with fur and feathers. They come from the dreaded kids’ Star Wars series with the [Jedi Prince](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ken) and the Whaladons (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Whaladon>) and [Laser Eyes Leia](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Leia_Organa_II) the droid decoy. I was really desperate for any Star Wars related reading material in my misspent youth and I have no shame. None.    
  
[Gualamas](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gualama) are one of a few different equines native to Naboo (you can see a different kind, the [gualaars](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gualaar), in Padmé’s funeral procession in ROTS.)    
  
The [Tiss’shar](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tiss'shar) are reptilian aliens with several different subspecies. Most illustrations show them looking like a [deinonychus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus) relative minus the feathers and enormous talons. I decided they needed a type with the can-opener feet, because that would be cool.    
  
[Tusk cats](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tusk_cat) are another Naboo animal. Some of Lydia’s former neighbors have several species of livestock and working animals from that world because they lived there at one point.    
  
[Anoobas](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Anooba) are wolf-like creatures from Tatooine. They are known for escaping from captivity and forming packs in places very different from their native habitat, even surviving on Coruscant.


	13. Delinquent Droid (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 3)

** 41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 3   
  
** The droid was surprisingly hard to track. In most cases, you can easily locate a droid of any size by sound alone. This one seemed to possess a pittin’s silent feet. No telltale sounds hinted at the direction it had gone. I jogged through the hallways, peering into the corners and crevices. After several minutes of looking, I thought to check the cargo bay. Complex droids develop quirks over time, especially when damaged. Major trauma to their systems can cause odd behavior, including what seems to us organics like obsessive revisiting of the event. The runaway droid might have simply returned to the scene of the earlier fight. The cargo bay was as vast and dark as before. I walked over to the loading ramp door and poked at the sealant. Still not deteriorating.    
  
A sharp pain lanced through my ankle and I yelled, hopping backwards and clunking against the wall with no grace whatsoever. What the – okay. After all my pointless wanderings, the little droid had come to find me. And had evidently lost its manners. Trails of lights blinked on and off along the machine’s legs and head, seeming unnaturally bright when seen through my night-visor. The insect-like, spindly-legged body danced around in a movement that reminded me of an irate driver who had just had their hoverspeeder rear-ended in rush hour traffic. The two delicate forelegs waved at me in what I was pretty sure was an invitation to fight. Then the droid began to make noise. From the few recognizable sounds that I could almost make out, it was trying to speak Binary at me.    
  
Unfortunately for both of us, its speech functions seemed to have been affected by the recent ordeal and if I read the droid’s increasingly frantic scuttling movements right, it was becoming extremely frustrated. The first weak staticky buzzes soon trilled into incoherent, painfully high-pitched _zeeep_ s and rubber band twanging sounds. I very slowly began to inch away – and nearly fell over again as the little droid charged, leapt, and landed squarely (and much too sharply) on my chest, chattering away like an enraged mechanical kelele bird.    
  
“Oww. Those are not a droid shelf. Release your pincers.”    
  
More Binary insults were peppered among the unreadable screeching. My new friend was gaining some vocabulary back, but not the good kind.    
  
“Did you just call me – oww. A thousand times oww. Who taught you that word? Never mind. Stangit. Release and take your prickly little pincers over to my shoulder or else. Listen, I’ve been stuck sneaking around an empty locked ship of questionable safety for the last hour and change. I am worried, I am cranky, and you are stabbing me in a non-negotiable no-stab zone. I am dead sure that I have an “else” somewhere in my toolkit.”   
  
We glared at each other. Bringing unblinking acid-green photoreceptors to a staring contest is cheating, in my humble opinion. I decided to forge ahead as though I had won and tapped my shoulder expectantly. Growing up surrounded by Imperials and felines of various stripes has its benefits when it comes to the skill of bluffing. The droid moved to my shoulder and seated itself with a much lighter grip.    
  
“So, you’re trying to tell me something important but your language skills got a little fried. Can you show me a visual recording through the datapad back in my room?”   
  
A sour short _blaat_ of contempt greeted the suggestion. Aww, my poor old datapad was scorned by a droid a fraction of its size. Or so I thought until a tiny holographic display flickered into place before my eyes. Now I could see why the droid was so dismissive of the visual evidence. There were recorded images and even audio of what had happened. However, the figures of the beings moved so quickly that the droid’s photoreceptors couldn’t keep pace with them and what did appear was distorted. Blank glaring bright spots and strange-looking haloes danced across the projected image, obscuring the action almost entirely. The flaws in the image reminded me of the bright spots that appear when you press your fingers against your eyeballs with the lids closed. Every now and then something would swim into focus, only to disappear or move out of range. The audio was no help, sounding so garbled that I couldn’t even tell if anyone was speaking at all.    
  
There were at least two beings, just as I had guessed from the footprints. The taller one rarely appeared, reduced to scattered flashes of the corner of a cloak and the glow of a lightsaber. The distortions clung to the figure’s outline and obscured his hands and face from view. That was an eerie sight, but I already had seen some of the strange things Inquisitors could do with electrical fields. It was the other being that made me blink and feel like the floor had dropped from under me when I finally spotted a clearer shot of his face.    
  
Mr. Creepy? It couldn’t be, and there was no rational reason for it to be. Yet there he was, just for an instant before the holoimage suddenly blinked out and was gone. Okay, so now a random sleaze from the spaceport somehow followed us here, kidnapped Isurus, and disappeared, along with every sentient being on the shuttle except for me. And there was no way of telling who had actually sealed the exit. Fantastic.    
  
Not to mention that none of it made a drop of sense. If this person was truly a random creep, then how could he have traced the _Draigon_ ’s path (especially when Barrett seemed to have a downright pathological need to scan for unwanted devices every time we left a stop – I don’t think he slept for 48 hours after we left Shullia, which perhaps explains a lot), navigated through the hazards of a secret Deep Core spacelane, and avoided the _Interdictor_ patrols? No way. The galaxy’s got a considerable number of psychos who might try to isolate a lost girl if they spotted one wandering through the spaceport. But it was beyond the bounds of reason to think that such a person would just happen to possess the specific skills to trail the _Draigon_ so far from our original encounter. It was too coincidental, and frankly depended way too much on this theoretical creep being focused on me somehow – which actually now didn’t seem to be the case. After all, as far as I could tell the intruder had gone straight for Isurus and set about taking him out of the tank.    
  
Though I’m not an expert in the mental processes of deranged stalkers, “okay, we’ve risked disintegration by hyperspace accident and/or Interdictors to follow this girl from the spaceport, now let’s spend our precious time kidnapping a heavy, difficult-to-transport invalid from the bacta tank that just happens to be here” did not seem like an especially likely motive for our mystery intruder. This led me to the uncomfortable suspicion that I had seriously misjudged what was right before my eyes on Dachat.    
  
“Show the face from the last part of the recording again,” I said and was impressed but not astonished that the droid managed to come up with just the picture that I needed to compare the man’s face to my memory. There was no denying that it was the same person I’d met on Dachat. I remembered my first glimpse of him from the corner of my eye. He wore ordinary spacer’s clothing, had an attractive but not unusual face, and carried a light travel bag over his back. The faded magenta tint to his skin hinted that he might be a near-human of some species I didn’t recognize. Nothing extraordinary about seeing a rare species in this crowd (which was quite a contrast to Shullia, where there were many aliens but only a couple dozen different species to be found.) At least three different necklaces were draped around his neck, marking him as either a fan of garish jewelry or a slower runner than the souvenir vendors. He was one anonymous being among many, moving along with a smooth, gliding walk that increased in speed much too quickly as he approached me. That change in gait screamed “predator” and set all of my defenses on high.    
  
He smiled disarmingly, but there was something far too sharp in his gaze. “It’s a maze here, isn’t it?” he said sympathetically. “Ha, I’ll probably have to call my friends for directions back to my own ship and it’s not like I’ve never been here before. I can hardly believe the chaos every time.” He laughed. “I almost think they hide entire corridors from one visit to the next. Just the ones that I need, of course. The builders must have been related to the barves who built Zirtran’s Anchor. Someday the whole place will sink into a dimensional rift and disappear for the next hundred years. Personally, I just hope it doesn’t take me or my crew with it. The food here is not something you want to be stuck with for the rest of your life.” The spacer’s wrinkle-nosed expression made me laugh in spite of myself.    
  
“It’s okay,” I told him in a mock-soothing voice. “Within a few months you’d be reduced to hunting mynocks and fellow travelers with a sharpened souvenir umbrella, anyway. Unless the mystery meat in Bolooga’s Bantha Burgers really is vervikk after all. Then I suppose you all might live off the local rodent colony for years.”   
  
“Has anyone ever told you you’re morbid?” he asked rhetorically.   
  
The entire laundry list of people who have told me I’m morbid could take years to recite. “What, me? I’m not morbid at all, just thorough,” I said. “You have to think these things through. Otherwise when disaster strikes you have no plan. And whatever will you do without an umbrella?” My best stern-eyebrows, this-is-a-serious-talk expression got an appreciative burst of laughter from the spacer.   
  
He said, “Maybe I should just hire you. You can be the Keeper of the Hunting Umbrella. Wouldn’t be any stranger than some of the other job descriptions I’ve known. There was this Ugnaught back when I was hauling freight with an outfit from Bespin…”   
  
We’d fallen into a comfortable stride, moving along slowly but surely as he babbled on about the colorful characters he’d met in his years of hauling cargo. Wait a minute. Where exactly were we going? This was still a reasonably well-traveled area, but in the back of my mind the sequence of our journey played out again and something about it tripped the alarm that had inexplicably faded away to nothing during our conversation. Suddenly I recognized what was happening.    
  
He was herding me, just as carefully and professionally as a tusk cat guides its charges. Olana, the dominant female of the Meurics’ small pride, would amble along beside the most stubborn of nerfs with tireless patience until she could subtly direct the animal back into the herd. Nerfs are not agreeable creatures and if you’re going to get them to do what you want, it’s best to be tactful and make them think it’s their own idea. Wise old Olana knew this, and so, I began to suspect, did my new “friend.”   
  
Then I noticed something that clinched my unease. The friendly spacer had a mild scent that I had previously thought I would recognize anywhere. It was a fresh, soothing blend of cinnamon, rain, and something floral that I had never found an exact counterpart for. Zeltron pheromones – or at least close to how Rhajani’s had always smelled to me. We’d discovered that no two of our friends seemed to pick up the same scent, if they even noticed the pheromones at all. Most people don’t, they just happen to find that they feel better around and tend to agree with any Zeltrons they happen to know. Usually, this is pretty harmless. The worst most Zeltrons are likely to inflict on the unwary leads to things like buying a genuine nuna feather lampshade with the warranty because the lovely salesperson was just _so nice_.    
  
Still, it’s also true that not all members of the species are benign. Also, the spacer looked more like a human than anything, which might mean he was a hybrid. Zeltron-human hybrids are fairly rare (something to do with the compatability of blood types, if I remember correctly.) No two are alike, but I did recall that Rhajani saying that Zeltron hybrids occasionally became dangerous if raised out of contact with other Zeltrons. She claimed it was something about the lack of others who could teach them how to live with their pheromones and empathy. If this man was one of those unfortunates who turned out wrong, then I needed to get out of his personal atmosphere quickly. And if not, there was still something off here and I was still on a schedule. The sooner I went on my way, the better.   
  
Muttering an excuse about how I thought the route I needed to reach my ship might be further back the way I came, I attempted to step aside and get clear of the spacer. He wasn’t having any of it and matched my moves with fluid agility, dropping the pretense of conversation and swiftly closing in on my space. Not good at all. The situation was probably well within the bounds of my ability to defend myself, but my heart pounded anyway. Instinct. It wasn’t a bad thing, or so I’d been told many times. Overconfidence had never done me any good in training, and it could only get in the way now.    
  
I dodged and blocked an attempt to grab at my arm. In the back of my mind, I still remembered that I should not be here. Too much ruckus would get both of us hauled in by spaceport security. At the same time, I couldn’t take too many chances. A scrapper I might be, but Tissana Novaine I was most certainly not! No antigravity stunts for me. That was all right. I’d found the rhythm in the chaos of my adrenaline-fueled body. My opponent seemed confused that I was able to evade him. Every time I managed to twist out of his grip or duck out of range, there was a faint look of surprise on his face. What was his problem? It didn’t matter. Sooner or later – there, my opportunity. His unguarded foot and the momentum of my last kick came together so perfectly I couldn’t have planned it better. The spacer reeled backward, letting out a harsh shriek of pain before clamping down his jaw to muffle the sound.   
  
Go, now. I bolted for the main thoroughfare, skidding around every corner at top speed and weaving through the crowd with breathless apologies. Only after making several loops to ensure Mr. Creepy hadn’t followed me was I able to concentrate on the mission again.   
  
Looking back on the incident days later, it was not so difficult to believe that I had been mistaken in dismissing Mr. Creepy as a standard issue pervert. While he definitely had been trying to drag me off somewhere, maybe I’d been wrong about the reasons why. If his interest in me had to do with something about Isurus rather than the assault that I’d expected he had in mind… Perhaps he would have tried to run off with any of our group that he could find wandering alone.    
  
What he wanted any of us for was what I couldn’t comprehend. The Nebula Command has an extremely low willingness to negotiate with hostage-takers and I would expect the Second Imperium to have much the same approach. There was the possibility that he thought I knew something that would be useful to him. As if. I never know what’s going on here. It could also be that he was just trying to hinder whatever the _Draigon_ ’s passengers were trying to accomplish and wanted to take out as many of us as possible.    
  
Bramer and Zelenus had been separate from the rest of us for a while as well, so why not track them down as well? I wasn’t sure exactly how much their tasks had overlapped, since Bramer claimed primary responsibility for the mishap with the computer systems. Maybe they had been together most of the time and benefited from safety in numbers, or Mr. Creepy had picked up on my cluelessness and selected me as the easiest target, or I had just been the lucky winner who was spotted first.    
  
Too many unanswerable questions, as always. I sighed in aggravation. The droid on my shoulder chirped a testy remark about my processing speed, rearing up on its back legs. At least the little so-and-so was becoming easier to understand as it reintegrated its use of Binary. Simpler to cope with attitude than gibberish.    
  
I had to agree with the message the droid kept repeating most often among the rest of its insults: _out, out, urgent, out_. The more I learned, the more I felt like Isurus and the rest of the _Draigon_ ’s passengers were in serious trouble and the less I wanted to sit around trapped in this shuttle where I was completely blind to the outside world. All of the good reasons for staying put still existed, but they seemed less urgent than they had earlier.    
  
The truth is I was upset and that determined my choices more than anything. That I had totally missed the significance of my attempted kidnapper on Dachat gnawed at my sense of responsibility. Even in my paperwork based on the security recordings, I had barely mentioned my meeting with Mr. Creepy and downplayed it as much as I could. Tired and longing to finish the report so I could go to bed, I had told myself it wasn’t important. In reality, I had still been somewhat shaken by the fight and worried about how I would be evaluated. Other possibilities for what I could have done kept playing out in my mind. If I had chosen a different way to excuse myself for lurking around the edges of the spaceport instead of pretending to be lost, maybe there wouldn’t have been any problem. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I’ve always been able to drive myself more than halfway over the edge with maybes.   
  
Hence the desperate need to break out of the _Draigon_ and go after my shipmates. Totally reasonable. Hindsight has the highest resolution of all, as Mum always said.    
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
[Binary](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Binary) is the language of whistles, beeps, and other noises that droids use even if they aren’t programmed for Basic.    
  
Tissana Novaine (OC) is a character from a popular holodrama series produced in the Nebula systems. She performs a lot of silly and impossible feats through the power of special effects.


	14. Into the Woods (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 4)

** 41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 4   
  
** With my nerf-brained conviction that I must ride to the rescue _immediately_ and with the aid of an excessive amount of caff from the ship’s machine (someone with an interesting sense of priorities had the foresight to install a backup power cell for this most vital of appliances, though not for the ‘fridge unit), it wasn’t long before I had a plan. I have been told that it was not a particularly good plan. I can’t argue with that, and not just because the people who said so outrank me by millions of light years. Leaving the shuttle in and of itself was not such a terrible choice; nobody has tried to say that. The situation was extremely unusual. However, the means that I chose to break out were not the best, as everyone else involved in fixing the damage has informed me.    
  
Fear and oodles of caffeine do not make for good judgment. They do make for fantastic-looking diagrams. Prickly the Delinquent Droid seemed to approve of my new devotion to escape plotting and helpfully provided my ancient datapad with information on the _Draigon_ ’s various systems when I asked. It even stopped nipping at my heels (did I mention that it had no manners, none whatsoever?) and trying to drive me out of my room towards the exit door once it realized what I was trying to do.    
  
With the droid’s help, I plotted out the wiring of the _Draigon_ ’s cargo bay in neatly color-coded holographic diagrams and tried to find a weak point to exploit. If the door were merely locked and fried, it would be relatively easy to feed power from any of the independently running machines into the mechanism. Unfortunately, the goop coating would still hold everything in place even if the door were functioning. At least the visuals that the droid and I constructed helped me to remember the locations of things. Being able to see what you’re dealing with in a 3-dimensional chart gives one a sense of confidence. Now that I knew where the vital connections were, surely there must be something I could do.   
  
A functional lightsaber would have been perfect for breaking out, but none of those left onboard were anything of the sort. All of the practice weapons had been sensibly chosen with the intention of not accidentally damaging the shuttle’s spaceworthiness. The vibro-ax held some promise at first, but I was quickly reminded that the dratted thing had been specially designed for our safety; every time it got within inches of the outer wall, the power shorted out. Tiny chips of sealant dust flew from the door at each strike and soon made it difficult to breathe. After several minutes I was wheezing and the sealant had a dent only a fraction of a centimeter deep. Dedication wasn’t going to be enough.   
  
I sat down cross-legged and gazed up at the door, coughing occasionally and breathing through the sleeve of my shirt. Okay, so hotwiring or cutting my way out wasn’t going to work that easily. What else? Checking the materials in the maintenance closet might yield something useful and it gave me a reason to get up and move instead of just sitting around. The insect-like droid accompanied me, sticking close to my heels and sometimes running over my feet with its prickly little toes as I moved through the darkness.    
  
There was a respectable collection of tools hidden away in the closet, including everything I would need to repair the hyperdrive, the computer systems, the life support, or almost anything else on the ship. There were even spare parts for the bacta tanks. I found all sorts of cutting tools, things that would work fine on plasteel and not so well on four feet of burn-resistant sealant. Power packs could be retrofitted as explosives if needed, but there was nothing effective that I could use without some risk of singeing my skeleton. However, there was one item that caught my eye, a small canister covered in Aurebesh warnings and danger symbols. Xenoboric acid, of course! Many ships’ crews keep a small, carefully contained supply of the stuff for disposing of tough parasites like mynocks. It’s also sometimes used by pirates to melt through blast doors and other defenses when boarding. The reverse situation, using the acid to break down the sealant and escape, seemed like it might work as well.    
  
My droid shadow warbled a poem in Binary about the inadvisability of caffeine-addled organics handling dangerous materials. I shushed it and gathered up the acid container, neutralizer spray, and a breath mask in case the substance came out in a cloud (not something it was known for, but I didn’t want to be the freak accident that made the textbooks.) If I managed this carefully, it should cause only minor damage.    
  
Live and learn.    
  
As it turns out, xenoboric acid does a phenomenal job of dissolving even the toughest sealant. It also will keep on dissolving everything in its path as it follows gravity downwards. Although I had the neutralizing spray in hand, the destruction occurred so quickly that I was unable to prevent all of it. There was not only a hole in the shuttle’s floor; there was a hole in the _ground_. Barrett was going to kill me. Some of the acid got on the zhaboka that I used in place of risking my actual hands to poke the door open. It instantly became a former zhaboka, the tip disintegrating so quickly that I ended up flinging it outside into the great beyond. Lesedi was also going to kill me.   
  
The minute the outside air came in, I felt as though I had been tossed in an ice cold freezer. There was barely a whisper of a breeze, but the temperature was so cool that without the breath mask it stung every time I inhaled and my face began to feel chilled. I opened the pack that I had prepared earlier and grabbed the jacket, wrapping it around myself and shivering as I waited a minute for the neutralizer to do its work on the remains of the acid.    
  
Outside, the only sound I could hear was the faint whispering of tree branches. I stepped out into the nighttime landscape and felt pine needles crunch under my feet. Our landing spot seemed to be in a very lonely region. Conifer forest spread out in every direction and nowhere on the horizon could I see the faint glow that would hint at a distant city. Illumination from a single moon and the closely spaced clusters of Deep Core constellations beamed down through gaps between the slender trees. The undergrowth was sparse, making the few areas of brush look suspiciously like creatures in their own right; grasses became the waving tails of stalking felines and thorn bushes resembled great spiky-armored massiff spiders lurking just beyond the edge of the next clearing.   
  
When looking towards the stern of the _Draigon_ , I could see a craggy mountain range towering in the distance. That would have to serve as one of my landmarks, since the handy planetary navigator device I had grabbed from the _Draigon_ ’s stores was less useful than it could be. Satellites seemed not to exist on this world according to the device, and apparently even the magnetic poles were funny in some way. The machine refused to calibrate for the usual north, south, east and west. The functions that would normally allow it to determine what world I was on just spat out “access denied” messages, wanted to know what I was doing in a Level 15 Protected Zone, and threatened to sic the authorities on me.    
  
Nice to know. Ysborn, my home system’s grim little ice planet, only rates a 10 and has the distinctions of a horribly toxic atmosphere, lethal cold, and ravenous wildlife that loves both the freezing temperature and the toxins. I hoped there was a difference in the labeling schemes between the Second Imperium and the Nebula Command. If not, something might get us long before the local Imperial security forces had time to even show up. I had my doubts that such security forces existed anywhere nearby.   
  
There was a function that allowed me to take images of the starscape above and create a map and coordinates based on that information. Using that as a basis, I was able to set the location of the _Draigon_ as my starting place. As long as the night sky was visible, I’d be able to use the stars as a guide back to the shuttle. It would be so much easier back home, where each season brought a distinctive view of the Torch Nebula’s fiery veil and every corner of the sky was as familiar as the back of my hand. However, the navigator should do well enough to keep me from getting too lost.   
  
The trail left by those exiting the shuttle began with lightsaber-damaged trees, footprints everywhere, and blaster-burned patches in the forest floor. The area near the ship was full of these marks, but within a few meters the evidence petered out as the combatants’ tracks went off in several directions and became sparser. I soon got the feeling that I was retracing a complete mess. There were at least four places where I got a distinct whiff of whatever energy device had been used in the cargo bay. The only sentient-made debris left were items that I could only describe as rubbish: a crumpled self-heating drink container, some small twist-wires, and some pieces from a cheap music player. These pieces of trash carried the strongest hints of the electrical odor for some reason. I could not make any sense out of it, but pocketed the twist-wires. Evidence of something, anyway, and potentially useful for tying things together.    
  
The droid slunk along beside me, now and then scurrying off on some errand. Each time it left, I wondered if I should have confined it on the ship instead. Its circuits were probably fried in new and interesting ways since its deactivation in the cargo bay. Still, it felt comforting to have something so fierce in my company – even if it was pint-sized. At first the wind in the conifers had reassured me, but now I was beginning to wonder about the absence of other normal forest sounds. Midnight in a forest is supposed to be noisy, with droning insects desperately seeking love, avians squabbling over perches, and other little nocturnal creatures making oversized howls and screams. The recent skirmish near the _Draigon_ could be making the local wildlife shy, but there were other possibilities.    
  
As I was mulling over the possibilities and the chance of such possibilities being armed with sharp teeth or laser weapons, I heard a rustling in the branches high overhead and turned sharply to look at the source. It moved like a skirrit, scampering up tree trunks and leaping from one tall conifer to the next, but I couldn’t get a clear look at the shape.    
  
Needle-sharp points stabbed into the back of my neck and I let out a strangled shriek, striking backwards at the unseen attacker I was sure must be right behind me. There was nothing but empty air standing there when I turned around. I brushed at the painful area. My hand came away with an irate little droid hanging onto it grimly with one pincer.    
  
“You…” I didn’t know whether to be enraged or relieved and had to struggle to hold down the nervous laughter that I wanted to let loose. “What were you thinking? No, never mind. _Slow down_. You’re babbling again, Prickly.” The droid’s speech was lapsing into the untranslatable Binary slush that it had used on first awakening. The green strobe effect on its outer shell was in full operation, the lights moving faster than my eyes could track. The faster the droid’s vocalizations got, the more the lights increased in brightness and speed. I was certain that the lights were a communication feature. Sadly for both of us, the patterns were no more recognizable to me than the Binary codes Prickly was butchering.    
  
I was a lost cause and the droid knew it. It scampered down to the ground and tugged at the edge of my right sock. I stared in astonishment. Five cups of caff and my one remaining brain cell churned frantically, wondering what this tiny mechanical nincompoop wanted with my footwear. Was it suffering from whatever glitch affected that weird customs droid with the stolen clothing on Dachat? No, wait. Right. I smacked my forehead in annoyance. Prickly wasn’t after my socks, it wanted me to follow it somewhere.    
  
Well, why not? It wasn’t like I had a better idea how to track down the missing people.    
  
I trotted, then jogged, then ran flat out to keep up with the droid as it moved through the trees. Several times it got too far ahead and came racing back, shrieking and offended at my slowness. “There had better not be anything toothy out here”, I told it, “because we’re being heard by creatures dozens of kilometers away. And yes – it is your problem too. Remember that I can’t help you if something has me for dinner.” The droid didn’t like that much from the sulky tone of its soft humming, but it quieted down anyway.    
  
The landscape gradually became more hilly and densely forested as we moved away from the shuttle’s landing site. Within about twenty minutes of starting, I could no longer see more than a couple meters in any direction. Keeping up my pace became more difficult because the ground was strewn with boulders and dense, thorny plants. Prickly had no trouble with such obstacles, moving through the canopy swiftly while I picked my way through the forest as best I could. We were traveling on a downward slope towards a river or stream. Though I could not see the water, I heard it rushing somewhere nearby and felt the air become clammy with humidity. I smelled wet earth, flowers, and… something burning?    
  
Fear sent me scrambling through the brush as quickly as I could without breaking an ankle. Every step became slippery and treacherous as the droid led me down towards the water. There were patches of deep, soft mud hidden in plain sight. I accidentally plunged in up to my knees several times.   
  
It was probably just another charred tree, no casualties. At worst, maybe someone had set off a thermal detonator. Whoever this Mr. Creepy was, I was sure he had nothing to do with Vastag Slone’s happy little clan of sadistic firebug pirates. It was no good. No matter what I told myself, the place where I keep my waking nightmares was all too ready to supply images.    
  
Holding my sensory memories and stomach contents in became a struggle as the odor got worse. Finally, the cause of the smell was revealed as I reached the edge of the thorn bushes that clustered around the stream. Right across the water, a trail of destruction led to the smoking wreck of a repulsorcraft. Chunks of hull and shards of glass were scattered everywhere. It looked like the pilot had plowed right into the boulders of the opposite bank. I winced and steeled myself to see something not very pretty.    
  
Crossing the water involved a lot of mossy rocks, knee scrapes, and falling in the water, but I was already soaked with mud and almost beyond caring. The droid took the easy route, scuttling across the branches above, and was already pacing along a fallen log on the other side when I arrived. To my surprise, there seemed to be no obvious sentient remains among the speeder wreckage. Given the nastiness of the accident, that seemed very unlikely. Before I could examine the debris more closely, Prickly began fussing and lunging at my heels. It seemed uninterested in the speeder and whatever business it had apparently was not going to wait another second.   
  
Prickly’s goal seemed to lie just beyond every single thorn bush on the planet. At times we ended up backtracking and I would have suspected the droid of pure spite if not for its constant flickering lights and sounds of distress. The cries became more plaintive every time we retraced our steps. The tone of its voice worried me. Ever since we left the ship, Prickly seemed to become more frantic with each passing minute. It had me convinced enough that something was horribly wrong that when the droid’s chosen path led to my having to crawl under a seemingly endless thicket of thorn bushes, I went ahead and did it.    
  
By this time I was soaked, freezing, scratched, and so uncomfortable that I almost didn’t notice the pain when something on the forest floor jabbed into my thumb. Thinking it was yet another thorn, I went to brush it away, only to find something far nastier. My first thought was some kind of leech. After the initial moment of shrieking and swift removal, I realized that this was something a little different. The moonlight that filtered through the night-visor gleamed on a pale segment with a serrated edge that lay at the tip of the “leech.” It almost looked like some sort of animal’s tooth. Oh yuuuuck. There was just barely enough room among the thorny branches to turn around and reach my medkit. I fished out the general antivenin and antibiotic shots and applied them, hoping that I hadn’t been exposed to anything too unusual.    
  
The creature was writhing around with a twisting movement. The non-sharp end looked as though it had been severed recently. Served it right, I thought. Nasty. Out curiosity, I risked activating the glowrod to get a better look. Okay, that was not an improvement. Gray and slimy with a red trail of blood leaking from the injured part and something on the razor end that looked like – black fabric? If it was, then I needed to take a better look at it, somewhere where I didn’t have to crouch under a thorn bush. Carefully and while trying not to touch the creature, I managed to trap it in my small toolkit. That couldn’t be good for the tools, but there was nothing better at hand. No way was I putting it in the medkit or with the food supplies.    
  
Prickly watched all of this with unusual patience, though the light show continued to run over its carapace. When I was done collecting the evidence, we moved on.   
  
The undergrowth thinned back to the point that I could walk upright most of the time. The droid and I were surrounded by what looked like an impenetrable wall of thorns on all sides. The thought of having to find my way out again made me wince. The break in the thorny fortress seemed to be centered around a thicket of especially tall and ancient conifers. Inside the grove, the soft glow of the stars and moon was blotted out by the trees above. I stepped more softly, feeling as though I had intruded on one of the secret homes of the talking trees from one of Mum’s Galtean fairy tales. Some of those stories didn’t end so well for the ignorant humans who walked where they should not.    
  
Something whined a few meters away and I flinched, feeling my shaky nerves return at full throttle. The droid hurried on ahead, steering straight towards the sound. More sounds carried through the grove as we approached, labored breathing and eerie cries with a quality that went straight to my spinal cord. I moved slowly, holding my blaster at the ready and trying to present as small a target as possible.    
  
Rounding one of the massive tree trunks, I pushed aside a web of moss to see a tall man lying on his side in the hollow of another conifer’s outstretched roots. His leg was bent at an unnatural angle and his face was deeply scored with claw marks. It looked like his nose had been broken and was bleeding freely as well. Prickly rushed forward and leapt onto the man’s shoulder, whistling away at top speed. The small droid reached forward smoothly with one forelimb and before I could react, a needle extended from the leg and jabbed into the man’s neck. He barely twitched.   
  
The man muttered a word in some unfamiliar language. “’ve got enough nutrients an’ pain meds for a bantha. An entire herd o’ banthas. Stop.” His shaking hand rose up just far enough to trace the line of the droid’s head and back soothingly. The droid hummed pitifully and turned to me. The tone of its voice needed no interpretation. _Help my person_ , was the loud and clear message.   
  
I called out quietly, “Captain Barrett,” and ran towards him, igniting the glowrod. He looked terrible. I hoped that these were recent injuries and that he hadn’t been lying there for the last however-many hours alone.   
  
His name drew no reply. I’m not sure if he really heard it at all.   
  
At four feet away from Barrett, my foot crunched a pinecone and the switch was tripped. My weak and injured shipmate lunged off of the forest floor. His lips drew back in a feral snarl and he let out a sharp, stuttering hiss that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before or ever wanted to hear again. There are things that your gut knows are the last thing you will ever hear and this was one of them. I was barely aware that the droid had dropped to the ground at his side. There were other issues at the moment.    
  
My eyes were seeing it, but my mind could not process it. I had numbly dropped my blaster. Letting go of my weapon was something I had been drilled for years never to do, something that I had not done even in the first real blaster fight of my life. Now I could only lurch backwards for the cover of the trees, all grace and training forgotten.   
  
Everyone has something. Rhajani always gets jumpy when she sees barn uills after dark because they remind her of her older sister’s stories about the Zeltron bogeyman called Lovely Gold. Domitilla once admitted that when she was little she used to sleep _under_ the bed on stormy nights because the creaking of the windows sounded like Lord Nyax trying to pry his way in with spectral fingernails. The Meurics have enough gruesome family ghosts to fill a small town, all of which are said to follow future generations around and make things very unpleasant if they aren’t given their proper due at each harvest. Vera’s grandparents were killed during the Ahto City Massacre on Manaan and she’s obsessively terrified of all things oceanic. She swears up and down that she once heard Selkath could smell their victims from across the galaxy. As for me, I spent my early years poring over the entire Tulekahju Library’s holographic bestiary of monsters and my mother’s stories added a side helping of Galtean hobgoblins to the mix. Most of those childhood wraiths faded away with time. Still, there was one.    
  
Mum had always made a point of explaining the monsters that frightened me, pointing out the impossibilities of their existence and assigning me research to understand how they had formed from the fears and needs of the cultures that invented them. Galtea was an abandoned colony for nearly a thousand years. The stranded human settlers had to work hard to survive, especially after their technological supplies failed. Singing Lorley, the ghostly dust wraiths that guarded old battlefields, the deadly Huntsman of the Brinelands, Ragged Rykur, and the willow haunts of Parchbone River all existed to while away the cold winter hours and teach Galtean children that the wilderness bordering the settlers’ towns was never to be traveled carelessly. Historical backgrounds and logical reasons could be found for the same sorts of stories anywhere from the Rimworlds to the Core.    
  
Every kid has a never-deleted file of exceptions to the rules. One of the most memorable of mine happened when I came running to my mother in the middle of the night with nightmares of an Anzat scratching at the window. Mum gave me no explanation for why such things could never be. She simply said, “There are no Anzati here. They are very rare,” and sat by my side for the rest of the night. Not long after that, she started me on learning to fight and shoot with a neural stunner. The nightmares faded away as I became more occupied with my lessons. But that did not mean that I forgot, especially on summer evenings when I stayed out a little too long at the Meurics’ and had to return home through the lengthening shadows.   
  
All of which leads up to the fact that having our vaguely kooky shuttle captain come at me with Anzati feeders extended was enough to send me into a tiny bit of a panic.    
  
The glowrod illuminated his features, showing the same deeply lined face that I had seen day in and day out throughout the journey but for a few changes. His eyes were dilated so wide that there was hardly anything but pupil visible. The muscles of his jaw and face were oddly tense and the tentacle-like feeders I had only ever seen in storybooks emerged from his cheeks, thrashing around like angry snakes. One was tipped with a razor’s edge that I recognized immediately. My hunch was confirmed when the other proved to be severed near his cheek. I had to hold back terrified laughter. There was no way I could have expected the “leech” I’d found to come from one of my own traveling companions.   
  
Barrett hadn’t made it more than a single clumsy step towards me before his twisted leg gave out and he collapsed to the ground with a hoarse scream.    
  
I would have bolted even if he hadn’t been projecting “ _GET AWAY FROM ME!_ ”at top volume. Spacers’ tales said Anzati could hypnotize beings to draw nearer and let them feed without resistance. Apparently that ability let them clear a room as well. My leg muscles were determined to break out of orbit yesterday.    
  
I crashed into the thorn bush wall at the edge of the old trees and turned around. Nobody there. I crouched down, crawling backwards into the cover of the thorns and struggling to hold in a sob. I was a shaking mess. Okay, so I’d seen some bad things in my time. But there were bad things and then was this. This was _not_ okay. Breathe in, exhale, breathe in…   
  
Gradually, I regained my ability to think beyond the endless repetitions of “gonna die here, gonna die here.” Barrett was incapable of hunting me down in his current state. Even from where I was now, I could hear the sounds of pain that the droid and I had followed. _Get away!_ That was not a hunter’s lure. It was fear. I could feel it now, lurching in the pit of my stomach. The mental command was instinctive, a last ditch attempt to protect himself from danger.    
  
From me. In that moment of contact, I had experienced flashes of emotions and images that I was sure were not mine. Burned into my mind was the picture of a blurry shadow firing a blaster straight into my face. His face, I thought with detached shock. The shooter was me. I was certain of it the moment the thought crossed my mind. Barrett expected that of me, thought that it would happen as surely as stars burned and rivers flowed downhill.    
  
Maybe I should want to kill him, I thought. Depending on whose rumors you believe, Anzati may live on nothing but the brains of other sentient beings. Some say they have no conscience, that their entire lives are devoted to seeking their prey. What if he wasn’t even the person who was supposed to be piloting the _Draigon_? Perhaps the real Inder Barrett was buried in a shallow grave on some distant world, his identity stolen by the being that had devoured his gray matter. I shivered at the mental picture.   
  
The rustling of leaves and the sudden appearance of Prickly failed to surprise me. Somehow I knew that the stubborn droid would not give up yet.   
  
I looked up at Prickly, who hung upside down from a ragged branch and gazed at me with what seemed like a pleading expression. “What do you want me to do?” I asked warily. “He won’t allow me anywhere near. You’ve seen what happens.”    
  
_Fix_ , it chirped helpfully.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
[ Xenoboric acid](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Xenoboric_acid) is an extremely destructive form of acid that appears in a couple of Star Wars comic series.   
  
[Lord Nyax](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lord_Nyax) is a Corellian bogeyman with Sith-like characteristics known for kidnapping children. The older story became combined with the actual activities of Darth Vader and others who captured Force-sensitive children during the Empire.    
  
[The Battle of Ahto](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Ahto) was the event where Vera’s grandparents were killed. Selkath members of the [Order of Shasa](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Order_of_Shasa) (a local Jedi-like group) turned to the Dark Side and massacred tourists during a rebellion against the Empire’s mistreatment. The [Selkath](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Selkath) are an aquatic species related to the [Firaxan sharks](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Firaxan_shark) of [Manaan](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Manaan), which contributes to Vera’s shark phobia and mistrust of water.   
  
The [Anzati](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Anzat) are the Star Wars equivalent of vampires, a long-lived Force-sensitive species that feeds on the “soup” of other sentients. This is usually thought of by Anzati as a mystical substance, though they have to consume the other being’s brain to access it. They have tentacle-like feeders hidden in their cheeks and normally resemble humans so closely that they can pass for them without trouble. As far as I recall, they have never been known to sparkle.   
  
[Neural stunners](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Neural_stunner) are shock-based weapons, used for an effect akin to the stun setting on a blaster. 


	15. Doctors Don't Make the Worst Patients -- Force-Vampires Do (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 5)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 5**  
  
It was not madness but the quality of the thorn bush that I had chosen to hide under that ended up sending me off to Barrett’s rescue. Frankly, that was one of the more unpleasant pieces of plant life I’ve ever encountered. Something in the thorns was making my scratches swell up like little puffy boulders. Having seen myself in the mirror since, I can say that I must have looked terrible – seriously, Night of the Howling Falumpaset Woman terrible. Getting out (how in the blazes had I managed to dig myself in?) took a lot of maneuvering and hacking about with a laser cutter, and by the time I was free I was ready to “fix” anything, because I had _beaten_ that thorn bush. No Anzat with a hangnail was going to stanging well defeat my powers of getting things done.   
  
If there was one thing that I had learned from my two years at the Meurics’ farm, it was that there was no creature too large, too hazardous, or too clever to be ambushed and hauled off to the vet for whatever ailed it. All you needed was heavy tranquilizers, the right restraint gear, and enough people. Military surplus light armor was nice to have too, especially if it was the nerfs that needed tending.   
  
You would think the tusk cats would be the scariest, but usually they were well-behaved. The nerfs, on the other hand… well, the less said, the better. Evil-tempered little sons of murglaks. The poor dim-witted eopies were more of a menace by their clumsiness than anything else. I learned to hand-feed them their antiparasitics within a couple of months. The dwarf nunas were pretty despicable, but nowhere near as bad as the nerfs. At least they were short enough that a sturdy pair of boots could save you from being too badly pulverized. Parlan, the sole Talusian humbaba on the farm, burrowed when ill and was the hardest to catch (not least of all because he had an extraordinarily good memory and rarely fell for the same trick twice.) Even he could eventually be coaxed out of hiding with a bit of cunning.   
  
Anyway, the point was that I had already seen that you could subdue and treat almost any creature with the right approach. Dealing with an injured Anzat couldn’t be that much worse than the time Sweetiepie had to have shots for Greenish Nerf Fever and nearly took my ear off. The doctors fixed my Tiss’shar scars just fine before I left home, but Sweetiepie left her mark forever.   
  
It would be nice, of course, to have actual backup. Maybe even a qualified medical officer who was actually trained for this kind of mess. Still, if veterinary medicine was good enough for me and my neighbors during the invasion, it would have to be good enough for Barrett as well.   
  
The main problems that I was facing were simple enough to identify:   
  
Firepower. I had dropped my blaster and left it in the clearing. In a merciful universe, Barrett would be too out of it to notice the weapon, but I couldn’t count on that. Stars only knew what kind of additional dangerous items he might have on hand. From what I understood, he was originally an independent contractor who had been given access to an Imperial shuttle in return for allegiance and providing transport without questions. This made me wonder if he wasn’t necessarily devoted to the letter of Imperial law and might be carrying any illegal weapons he pleased. It seemed pretty likely, especially on account of his species. Most beings aren’t too happy about the prospect of their brainmeats ending up on the menu. If I were him, I’d be armed to the teeth. Probisces. Whatever.   
  
Transportation. Not only did I not have the medical equipment needed to treat severe problems, but I also was sure that this was no place to be hanging around. There was a definite possibility that Mr. Creepy or other hostiles could be lurking in the shadows. Any local carnivores had to be smelling the hovercraft accident as well as the injuries Barrett had sustained. Based on the crash site, I guessed that the ruined craft was not Barrett’s (unless he’d made an awfully quick exit) and he might have his own vehicle stashed somewhere nearby. There had to have been some kind of way for him to catch up to whatever he’d been fighting. Questioning the little droid revealed that there was a second engine signature, though Prickly didn’t seem sure of whether the vehicle was operational.   
  
The “patient.” Sweet bacta allergies, the patient. Exhausted, in obvious pain, and functioning on a purely instinctive level where he might well kill both of us while trying to escape from a rescue attempt. From the twisted look of his upper leg, I suspected his femur was broken. Lunging at me couldn’t have done him any favors. I still remembered Kadios Cibran bleeding out from a broken femur at the temporary field hospital on Shullia. That had been a much worse-looking, open fracture, but it made a grim reminder nonetheless. Old mythology texts I had seen claimed that the Anzati had no pulse. I took that with a grain of salt. Barrett definitely had blood and was losing it from the face injuries as well as any internal bleeding in the leg. That did not seem like a healthy thing, human-like circulatory system or no. Based on my past experience of farming accidents and finger reattachment (only one and they fixed it so well you can’t tell the difference anymore), I thought that the severed feeder was probably repairable for a few hours yet – if anyone was willing or able to get close enough. Hands up for volunteers? Lucky me.   
  
Weighing all of these issues, I decided the best to tackle first would be the transportation. If I could find a vehicle, there might be tools that I could use onboard. The best treatment for Barrett would require transport back to the _Draigon_ and earlier would be better. An armed landspeeder or bike would also be useful if any animals or beings showed up. It also crossed my mind that a vehicle, if handled right, could provide some shielding from any further surprise attacks. Barrett wasn’t in any shape to pull off a full ambush, but he was still a large, dangerous sentient. He might be extraordinarily strong as well, if the old stories were right.   
  
Prickly was able to lead me to the vehicle within a few minutes. The path involved more introductions to the local who’s who of spiny plants, but that was inevitable. I found the vehicle by walking into it, since it had been disguised with a rudimentary holographic camouflage unit. The illusion would not hold up so well in daylight, but my night visor was not up to the task. The droid seemed to have no trouble seeing through the image and easily found and deactivated the hologram emitter when asked.   
  
The vehicle appeared to be a souped-up version of a 74-Z speeder bike. I was relieved to see that it had suffered very little damage. There was even a substantial amount of gear included in a side compartment. Some of it was not familiar, but I was gleeful at finding an operational electroshock net and the protective armwear to handle it. As long as I didn’t somehow flub the aiming, that should be able to keep Barrett restrained for a few minutes. I dug further into the stores and found something that looked like the staticky tape that we had used to keep Isurus still during transport. Perfect. Well, nearly. If the electroshock net functioned as it should, I might be able to get Barrett taped up and tied onto the bike. I would not trust my ability to set his broken leg, but given there was no one better, I would have to at least try to immobilize it for the trip.   
  
That might be a pretty big “if”, depending on how subject his species was to electricity – for all I knew, it might put too much strain on him in his weakened state and cause him to have a heart attack or something. It might have no effect but to tick him off. However, it seemed like my best chance. From the way he had been acting and the thoughts he had projected, I didn’t think he was going to just listen to reason. Therefore, I would have to go with Irate Nerf Protocols (stay back and knock them out first if you can, because otherwise they _will_ find a way to get you.) Speaking of which, it would be a good idea to have some armor, or the second best thing. The breath mask from my pack went back on and I added some adhesive glue-like material that I found in the speeder. Not comfortable, but it would come off with the right solvent where drained brains were not so easy to fix.   
  
Moving the speeder back to Barrett’s location took more time than finding it in the first place, since I had to clear the path when the machine could neither go between the plants nor push through by force. Fortunately, the speeder could hover high enough that I was able to drive over many of the thorn bushes. The exceptions made grueling work. To my surprise, the droid was actually a lot of help there, having been equipped with blade-like extensions on its middle set of legs – a feature that surprised me when it brought them out with a soft click and began slicing away at a branch. It was somewhat unnerving to remember that I had been quarreling with the little dinko all this time.   
  
The old conifer grove was eerily still as I steered the speeder bike around the tree trunks. I couldn’t pick out any sound over the speeder’s soft humming. Hanging moss kept getting in my face and hair, which made it hard to see at times. When I thought the Anzat’s hiding place was close, I slowed down further. The engine of the machine had been modified to soften the noise, but it was still loud enough to hear from a close distance.   
  
Barrett was still exactly where I had left him, sprawled on the forest floor. He had pretty obviously fallen face first and didn’t have the energy to pick himself up. On the off chance that he was playing letharghu and saving his energy for another strike, I decided not to dismount from the speeder. Instead, I maneuvered the vehicle so that I could make a pass overhead and drop the electroshock net from above. It was tricky work to drive the speeder and deploy the net at the same time. Fortunately, I did not run into a tree (see that, License Testing Officer Suraval!) and the net activated as planned.   
  
“The hells, Sheltie?” I heard Barrett grumble faintly under the sparking net. He flopped over on his side with a yowl of misery and turned to glare balefully at me.   
  
I hopped down to the ground and was relieved to see my blaster lying at the edge of the grove. I nabbed it and stuffed it in the speeder’s compartment. It would have been nice to have the weapon if this were a task where I could keep my hands clear, but the last thing I wanted was to have to worry about a panicked Anzat trying to grapple for it while I was busy with the tape. To provide more light, I hung my glowrod from a nearby branch and turned the luminescence on high. I approached Barrett cautiously, trying to not startle him and to keep myself out of range until the last minute. This was not going to be fun.   
  
Barrett’s “ _Get away_ ” wasn’t as strong as the last time. It only froze me for a second before I plowed forward and darted the last few steps. Getting the Anzat’s arms pinned and taped together behind his back was a grim struggle. I mostly “won” because he was confined by the net and the remaining shock charge helped to stun his arms when I pressed the net against them. Though I tried to go for the pressure points that I had learned to use on humans, it was hard to tell if they worked or if it was just the static and exhaustion that wore him down. Either way, eventually I managed to get the arms taped.   
  
My unlucky “patient” was highly uncooperative in all of this. He _almost_ made the Meurics’ nerfs look civilized, trying to jab me in the neck with his elbows, slicing feebly at my arms with his remaining feeder tip, and cursing several thousand generations of my ancestors in detail and with remarkably little repetition. I had to wonder if Grand Inquisitor Tremayne knew what Barrett thought of his Nemoidian swamp gundark hatched by a blind dianoga – excuse me, I meant his mother.   
  
However, Barrett seemed to be acclimating to my presence, even if he wasn’t happy about being manhandled in the name of first aid. The random, shadowy images and thoughts that flickered at the edges of my mind were no longer about fears of being shot dead and mostly centered on annoyance and pain.   
  
Until I could move him back to the ship and find our crewmates, synthflesh spray-patching was the most I could manage for the deep scratches and feeder injury. I wasn’t sure if that was something that would cause permanent damage or not. It’s not as though Anzati appeared in the first aid manuals back home.   
  
When I brought the materials for a makeshift splint from the speeder, Barrett eyed me with resigned dismay.   
  
He croaked, “Girl, you know that’s actually a force pike, right?” I nodded. Sighing, he rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you know how to set that on safety before you go attachin’ it to my leg.”   
  
I smiled sweetly. “I’m sure I can remember as long as you hold still and stop trying to mangle me.”   
  
“Not the one who’s mangling here, Shelnay.” He looked at me with an unnerving level of focus. “Swear by all the Silent Voices, ‘f I die here from this nonsense, yer gonna be haunted. An’ I don’t mean by the overwhelming guilt of my terrible demise. Mean there’re less kindly things than an old snot vampire out there. Many of ‘em gone, but then there’s some few. Ones that still... well, anyhow. If ya can’t do anything but make this worse, then just go.”   
  
“Alright,” I said. What else was there to say?   
  
My jacket had to be sacrificed to make the wrapping, since there was nothing else to use but the tape. It hardly made me feel more cold, since my clothes were already soaked through and freezing. Barrett didn’t resume struggling when I clipped away part of the net. He just snarled in that dry, rasping way that had terrified me before as I taped the pike and cloth to his leg. Still disturbing, but I knew what I was dealing with (sort of) and what to do. Splints were in my training, at least. With surprising politeness – or weariness – the Anzat did not try to kick me with his uninjured leg. He gradually quieted down by the time I finished the splint. I thought maybe he had decided to trust me. Then I noticed that he had passed out.   
  
To make loading easier, I brought the speeder bike over and turned off the repulsorlifts so that it sat on the ground. Then I faced the awkward task of moving Barrett. Unfortunately, he was a large and unwieldy burden. Trying not to jar and further damage his leg made things more difficult. The droid watched all of this with no comment but an occasional nervous-looking twitch. I had just managed to get Barrett draped over the speeder and fastened down, and was working on finding a way to keep his head and neck safe during transport, when I heard Prickly shriek a danger alert. Though I looked up to scan the area, it was already too late. I felt cold metal press against the side of my head.   
  
_Chanchró suchetsui_. I silently used the worst of the Galtean swears that Mum accidentally taught me. I knew what that feeling was, even before my captor efficiently punched me in the solar plexus. While I was stunned by the blow, they pulled me down to the ground and set about taping my wrists together behind my back – much the same way that I had done to restrain Barrett only a short while ago. Whoever it was had long fingers, rough, leathery skin, and an iron grip.   
  
She said, “Where is he?” I didn’t know what she meant. She wasn’t happy with that and came around to look me in the face, jamming the blaster against my skull more harshly than before. My heart was galloping. Even in the chill, I could feel sweat beginning to form on my neck. Just seeing the look on her face told me I was in deadly trouble, if the rest were not enough. Hers was not an expression that accepted the existence of obstacles.   
  
Now that I could see her, I knew a little more about my assailant. She was a Weequay female who looked like she had been carved from an especially resolute limestone cliff. Probably young for her species, since the deep patchwork wrinkles of her face had not yet formed the extensive cross-hatching of middle age. The stubby horns protruding from each of her cheeks had not been sharpened, unlike those of the Weequays who joined Slone’s pirates. Her head was shaved bald in the usual fashion for females, but she had grown a single braid that fell a little past shoulder length. It wasn’t formed in the topknot style used by males away from Sriluur and I was unsure what it symbolized, if anything at all.   
  
She wore a slightly fraying weatherproof jacket and durable trousers in similar condition. Her boots were not new, but looked like they had originally been on the expensive side of practical wear – Rhajani’s family sold something similar to participants at the yearly rodeo in Tulekahju. They were meant to take almost any abuse that angry creatures or the elements could dish out. The weapon that she was currently holding against my head was a DL-44 heavy blaster pistol. It could be over two decades old, but the sheen that overlay its scarred and pitted finish told me that it was cared for with religious dedication. I had no doubts about its working condition.   
  
“Who are you looking for?” I asked, trying to keep my tone calm and even. The breath mask over my lower face made my own voice sound strange to my ears, though the respiration was barely louder than normal.   
  
The Weequay didn’t want to be calmed. She reached out with her free arm and shook me by the shoulder until my teeth rattled, then grabbed the side of my face (I was going to have one heck of a bruise tomorrow; I could feel it) and yanked my head up to her eye level.   
  
“Don’t. I am not patient today. This is no time to play games with a baby Imp vornskr.” She wrapped her fingers around my throat and squeezed, just hard enough to let me know what damage she could do. Plenty. Worse yet, I began to feel the static buzz that I had picked up during my encounter with Ombyrne. Another Force-user. Spectacular. What, exactly, had my neck done to offend the spoon-bending collective mind recently?   
  
I gurgled unhappily. The Weequay released my throat and stared me down with a look of pure contempt. She said, “Fine. Let me spell it out for you. You had Arik on your ship. Inahki and I took him away. Your Imps chased us, so we split up. Now Inahki is missing. I can feel him nearby. You,” – and she poked my neck for emphasis – “need to tell me where he is. Is that too complicated for little vornskrs? Should I draw pictures?” Somehow, I didn’t think I wanted to know what medium she had in mind.   
  
Alright, so she and Mr. Creepy (Inahki?) had taken someone named Arik – that must be Isurus – from the ship. She wanted me to lead her to Mr. Creepy? I had no clue where he had gone, even if I wanted to help a kidnapping ring that specialized in mostly-dead amputees. Where was Isurus/Arik/what’s-his-name, anyway?   
  
Rustling from the direction of the speeder bike made us both turn to look. There was an instant that I might have been able to take advantage of the Weequay’s distraction, but it seemed to occur to her in the same moment. Instead, I got a resounding clout on the head that made my ears ring and her elbow hooked under my throat in a tight grip as she aimed her blaster at Barrett.   
  
Most of my energy was spent on trying to get a lungful of air. I could feel the pulse racing under her skin, even though her breathing was deliberate and even. I was pretty sure that Barrett and I were both going to die. This woman was agitated, dangerous, and trigger-happy. Even if I knew what she wanted me to tell her (and I didn’t), there was no way that she could be allowed to just walk off with a criminal who had attacked Imperial personnel and helped kidnap one of my shipmates. Still, if I could come up with a convincing lie, get her to leave Barrett behind unharmed, and use what I had seen of the landscape to lead her into a trap… I was trying to come up with a plan, when Barrett saved me the trouble (or made more, depending on your point of view.)   
  
He said, “Crash.” The Weequay jerked backward like she had been hit, then stilled. Her eyes flickered back to my face and caught the look of alarm I tried to quash. That smoldering wreck was bad news, if she was set on finding someone who had been in it. No bodies, but then I hadn’t had time to search very long, either.   
  
She looked back and forth between Barrett and I, the muscles in her jaw clenching in a way that made me extremely nervous.   
  
Decision made, she firmly held me back with her left hand and shot at the speeder bike twice with lightning speed. I made an instinctive attempt to rush forward and got clonked upside the head again for my trouble. I blinked up at the sight of fizzling electronics and wondered distantly why there was no blood. It took me a short time to realize she had only shot the control panel and steering mechanisms of the bike. Barrett was apparently of no further interest.   
  
I, on the other hand, was evidently the winner of the annual Tromp through the Dark Thorny Forest at Gunpoint raffle. My captor was definitely in a hurry, so much so that she would occasionally just hang me over a handy fork in the nearest tree while hacking out a path through the underbrush. This was not comfortable or dignified from my point of view – especially when my point of view was upside down. I learned that she carried a rather sharp machete-like tool as well as the blaster. Only one side of the blade held an edge, but that edge looked severely wicked.   
  
We made our way down into the muddy, miserable riverside area where she had concealed her vehicle. It was a hodge-podge creation with about three quarters of some unidentifiable landspeeder’s large body welded onto the wings and powerful engine of a Peregrine-240 swoop. There seemed to be an extra engine in there, too. It was about the least appealing Ugly craft that I had ever seen and I fully expected it to explode spectacularly upon starting. Distressingly, the Weequay did not seem inclined to let me sink into the mud and stay behind.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
Lydia is fond of cheesy horror films, including _The Night of the Howling[Falumpaset](http://%20http//starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Falumpaset) Woman_.   
  
Dwarf nunas are a smaller breed of the regular that originally came from Naboo. They are mentioned in the article on nunas. (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nuna>)   
  
The [humbaba](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Humbaba) is a large domesticated herbivore found on Corellia, Talus, and Kashoon. Wookieepedia says they burrow in swamp lands. Given the apparent size of the animals, that has to make a tremendous mess.   
  
The [74-Z speeder bike](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/74-Z_speeder_bike) is the type used by the Imperial scouts on Endor in ROTJ. It’s an older model but a popular one, and the Remnant has to continue using a lot of antique machines by this point.   
  
The letharghu is a creature from Shullia that “plays possum” when threatened, though it is a feathered reptile rather than a marsupial.   
  
The beliefs of the Anzati give special significance to the [Silent Voices](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Silent_Voices), glowing strands of atmospheric gases that can be seen in the night sky of the species’ homeworld. These lights are seen as the life forces of their ancestors.   
  
“Chanchró suchetsui” refers to the fairly gross defense mechanism of a marsh creature from Galtea. The chanchró (real world origin is from _kankro_ , an Esperanto word that means “crayfish” and ultimately comes from Latin for “crab”) can spout globs of blood mixed with an acidic compound. Suchetsui is the acid/blood ickiness that they produce (real world origin is from _shukketsu_ , which Wiktionary has as the transcription for the Japanese word for “bleeding.”)   
  
[Uglies](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ugly) are normally starfighters, but I imagine the term could also be applied to any vehicle that was created from a mishmash of different models.


	16. Dzidra and Arik (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 6)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 6**  
  
  
By some miracle, I was able to make it through getting into the swoop-ish monstrosity without getting hit over the head again. The Weequay checked my bound hands. She then lifted me up and more or less tossed me into the back area of the speeder, which had the seats removed to make room for cargo. Except that in this case, the cargo was myself and Isurus. Arik. Somebody. Well, now I knew where he was, for all the good that did me.   
  
Oddly enough, he looked less wraith-like than he had before. When the driver turned around to examine us with a glowrod, he actually moved his head and tracked the light with his eyes. He had not been that alert on Dachat. There was a reality to his presence that contrasted against what I had seen when treating him. This time he was not well at all, but did not have that aura of someone slipping away. He was miserable, but miserable _here_. Being in the bacta for a few days must have helped. There was little visible bleeding through the bandages that someone had replaced after taking him out of the tank (the Weequay? Hard to imagine, but so was Mr. Creepy.)   
  
A strange dark-colored stain at the base of his hair made me think he had a new head injury from Ms. Duracrete. Then I noticed that it was constant across the roots of his hair and that the liquid dripping down from the “injury” appeared blue-green. Poor lighting and the hue's distortion when seen through my night-visor might have had something to do with that, but it still seemed unusual. In fact, it looked like the time that I had helped Domitilla wash out the results of a really bad attempted dye job. We used another chemical that we thought would counteract the original dye, but it ended up interacting and making it worse. This meant more washing and more unnatural colors.   
  
As the hovercraft’s engine started (a process which involved a lot of questionable coughing sounds and creaking metal), the badly-dyed stranger stared at me with curiosity. He poked at my night-visor and breath mask like he didn’t recognize the objects at all, then brushed one of the thorn scratches near my left eye. My sudden retreat seemed to startle him.   
  
“Oh. Right. Sorry,” he said. “Looked like you were an Ubese or something, but they don’t leave their hair uncovered. Thought I was having a hallucination.” There was a slur in his voice that, combined with the lack of coordination in his arm movements, made me think he was on heavy painkillers.   
  
He asked, “Were you that – the other girl that was there when they brought me in? Kind of blondish and short, and Ombyrne didn’t like her. I mean, he doesn’t like anyone much, but that’s not important.”   
  
“Blondish and short, yes.” At least it wasn’t “blondish and furry”, as it was for a few weeks after Chelii’s youngest brother discovered the wonders of adding Bimmisaarian hair growth potion to everyone’s shampoo.   
  
The engine made a disturbing noise as the Weequay made a hairpin turn to avoid a conifer. Both of us in the back groaned and curled into the floor. It didn’t help much, given the constant thumps and bumps generated by the hovercraft’s mismatched structure.   
  
“Fierfek, Dzidra. Could you make this a little worse?” Isurus grumbled.   
  
The driver turned around and I flinched in reflex.   
  
She said, “Excuse me, I’m trying to drive in the dark, in a forest full of ronto-sized trees. Also, there are Sithly vornskrs with lightsabers around here somewhere. Would you like to call back later and leave a message with our smoking corpses?” in a downright unsettling, cheerful saleswoman’s tone of voice.   
  
Isurus cringed and yelled, “Look ahead!”   
  
We barely missed plowing into a boulder, the nerve-wracking event made worse by the fact that Dzidra of the duracrete hands _never turned to look ahead_. She just swerved the Ugly hovercraft without looking and somehow we avoided the rock. I decided that it was better not to know what was going on outside and braced myself against the side of the compartment with my eyes closed tight.   
  
Someone prodded at my shoulder. I looked up to see Isurus’ worried, turquoise-smeared face leaning over me. “Are you alright there?” Between the constant clattering of the hovercraft and the pounding inside my head, it was difficult to focus enough for eye contact. He called to the driver, “Dzidra, I think the Imp is concussed or something.”   
  
“Oh, for the gods’ sake.” She turned around again with no apparent regard for the scenery whipping past. “This is really not the time or place. I need her to lead us to Inahki, and then I’ll leave her tied to a tree. Carefully, I promise. Let the other Imps take care of her. We are not running a vornskr rehab clinic. And you need to sit down and rest!”   
  
Imps. That put a different spin on things. All this time, I had assumed Isurus-or-Arik was one of our own who had been rescued from a mission gone horribly wrong, and then sneakily kidnapped by the team of Creepy and Duracrete. I suddenly felt extremely foolish. What had anyone ever said to confirm that he was an Imperial? Knowing that he was – actually, I didn’t know what he was, but knowing that he was something other than Imperial made me feel even more trapped and out of my depth. Any number of people in the Galaxy might casually refer to us as “Imps.” Still, it was a disrespectful term and the whole conversation was disturbing. In particular, I wondered if “carefully” to Dzidra meant “upside down.”   
  
Arik looked at me uncertainly. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then seemed to think better of it. Maybe the worst part of my new discovery was that I had not expected it at all. Dzidra and Inahki both had the dress and mannerisms of fringers, the kind of people who might make their living as anything from outright pirates to borderline-honest traders or bounty hunters. They projected the kind of streetwise confidence that I expected from that group. I had personal experience of their willingness to attack a semi-innocent bystander. In Arik’s case, my first impression involved him quietly curling up at death’s door and me trying to patch him up while praying he wouldn’t die right then and there. It was not really the kind of meeting that inspired me to think of him as a potential adversary.   
  
He did not appear to be comfortable with my treatment. If he had been tricked into going along with these crooks, or if he had doubts about his involvement with them, there might yet be a way out of this. My shipmates had wanted him kept alive. There must be a way to convince him that he would be better off cooperating with me, even returning to the _Draigon_ – if only I could get us both free from this rattletrap vehicle.   
  
We had traveled for only a few minutes, and I already considered myself hopelessly lost. The distant mountain range only appeared through the trees occasionally and was further away every time. I could not help thinking that I would never find my way back to the ship. Then I remembered the navigation device and was simultaneously relieved and terrified. On one hand, I was not really lost. On the other hand, that was not necessarily a good thing; having that device meant that I did have a way to lead the Weequay to that crash site.   
  
There was nothing I could do about it. No way to jettison the machine with my hands tied, and especially not without drawing attention. I felt like the truth was written on my forehead: _I totally know where everything is and you can feel justified in shooting me for it_. It seemed likely that no one would ever find me if they did.   
  
Watching the muddy riverbank fly past, I thought about being left there forever. It was almost funny, because when I was younger, one of my favorite things to do was searching for old fossils in the Rafnkell Mountains. Eons ago, those fossils had been created from plants and animals that were preserved in mud. Perhaps many years from now, someone would be picking through the rocks and say, “Hey, is that from a human? Kinda short, wasn’t she?”   
  
The conversation, such as it was, had petered out. Arik had a pained look on his face and I thought that either the painkillers were wearing off or he had overtired himself by moving around and talking.   
  
Although I had initially thought we were headed away from the _Draigon_ ’s landing site, it turned out that we had made a loop around and headed back towards it. It was not easy to keep track of our direction. Dzidra often turned the vehicle around and went off down any path that the forest allowed, seemingly at random. Sometimes she would halt the hovercraft and stare off suspiciously in the direction of perfectly blameless trees and rocks, only to wheel around and take us back to somewhere that I knew we had already passed. Our ride finally slammed to a stop in a clearing that I recognized, not far from the path that Prickly and I had followed down towards the river.   
  
The Weequay jumped out and paced a circuit of the clearing, pausing now and then as though she were listening for something. Soon, as if there had been no reason to leave the hovercraft in the first place, she climbed back in and started up the engine. It sputtered resentfully as she took us off on yet another racing path through the woods.   
  
Raising his head, Arik asked, “Can you sense him yet?”   
  
She muttered something under her breath, then said, “A little. Enough to tell if we’re getting closer.” Then she pulled another blaster from the driver’s storage unit and handed it to Arik, saying, “Keep this trained on the vornskr. If she leads us wrong, shoot her.”   
  
Arik took the weapon with dismay, but immediately aimed it at me with a surprisingly steady grip. Not unfamiliar with blasters, then. Stang.   
  
He looked at me as though I might bite. I glared back, trying as best I could to assure him that I would, in fact, gnaw his face off given half a chance.   
  
“Dzidra, we’re not dealing with an Inquisitor,” he said with a hint of rebellion.   
  
I was a bit caught between the possibility of an ally and my steadily decreasing sympathy for Arik. His story was still a mystery, but he was helping to threaten me with a blaster. Even when done reluctantly, that kind of thing does not endear people to me.   
  
Dzidra said, “I know that. That’s why we’re using her as a guide instead of just killing her. By the time these nutbars are done with their Imp training, they have no survival instincts left. This one’s a brainwashed twit, but she’s still afraid of dying.”   
  
Why, thank you Ms. Duracrete.   
  
She brought the hovercraft around a bend in the riverbank and said, “Which way?” The command that I was to become fried critterflakes if I refused to answer was unspoken, but Arik and I both understood.


	17. Out of the Frying Pan (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 7)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 7**  
  
“Give me the blaster and help me get out of here”, I whispered to Arik. “Just come back to the ship with me and I’ll tell them how you aided me. They’ll work something out for you _._ ”In all honesty, I doubted there was anything to be done for him. Still, it was just barely possible and I did not think that threats of Imperial retaliation would lead to any change of heart. Best to see if he would cooperate and if so, then perhaps Lesedi or one of the others would be able to get him back into the Second Imperium’s good graces (assuming they were so inclined.) Not my area of expertise, for certain.   
  
He clearly understood my words, but unfortunately wanted none of it. His face set stubbornly and he shook his head.   
  
“Are you out of your mind?” he hissed. “What makes you think I would _ever_ want to go back to there? If you hadn’t noticed, I had a little trouble getting out in the first place!” He glanced at the wrapping on what remained of his right leg.   
  
“Wait, you – “ I choked on my question and could not finish it. Running through everything that had happened, I felt rather like I had just had another swat to the skull from Ms. Duracrete. This was… something that I had no idea how to handle. Skrag it. To my further dismay, I could tell that Arik picked up on my speechless state. Control over the direction of the conversation was out of my hands before it had even started.   
  
“You’re one of the new ones, aren’t you?” he asked with less venom.   
  
Frowning in confusion, I questioned, “What new ones?”   
  
Arik said, “The ones that they’re using for that program next door. You aren’t a trained Force-user; your presence is faint but it’s the wrong kind of faint for someone shielding. I’m surprised they accepted someone who’s nearly Force-blind.”   
  
He knew the term, but did not say it with the condescension that I was used to hearing from Force-users. From the things he said, it sounded more and more like he had somehow been at Karkaryss. And he had been “next door” to some mysterious program. Stranger and stranger.   
  
“It’s not as wonderful of a deal as they make it sound, you know,” he said. “Look… what’s your actual name?”   
  
Falling back on the fake ID, I told him, “Deliya Heringshai.”   
  
“No, it’s not.” He rolled his eyes, but continued without arguing further. “Anyway, whoever you are, it’s going to follow you. Rename yourself, strut around in a swishy drama cape, scare your friends and nervous acquaintances with fits of electricity, do whatever you like. You’ll still be the same old, same old in too many ways that you’d rather forget . Different in ways that are inconvenient, too.”   
  
Arik looked for comprehension in my face and found none. I’m sure it all made sense to him, but then he was injured, possibly influenced by pain meds, and who knew what else? Could he be going into shock again?   
  
I said, “That’s not exactly the plan. As you noted, I’m not Force-user material. No drama cape for me.”   
  
He made a _hmmm_ of disagreement. “Maybe so. You had better hope they believe that. If I were you, I’d be thinking about what I really want to do with my life.”   
  
“And what do you want to do with your life, Arik?” I challenged him. This was going way off the rails into territory I didn’t want to tread. I’m a good student, a skilled amateur techie, and can herd a nerf like nobody’s business. Being special because of some mystical inborn quirk is what defines Isander’s life, just as it does my father’s. It has nothing to do with me. That’s been made clear many times over the years – and really I’d rather it stayed that way.   
  
Hopeful that the gloves I was wearing might slip off and allow me to free my hands, I was trying to slowly slide them off while conversing with Arik. It was not going well. The gloves were made of clingy material and the Weequay’s knot-tying abilities were unfortunately very good.   
  
Arik squinted at me curiously. “Do you know that you almost completely disappeared just now? It’s very disconcerting. Especially since you shouldn’t be able to.”   
  
For a second, I thought he really was hallucinating; then I recognized that he was talking about some sort of Force weirdness again. His question reminded me of Lesedi’s tests. I hoped that I was not as interesting as she seemed to think.   
  
Dzidra called back to us, “Stop talking to her! Just get the directions already. And if you can’t feel her presence, it’s probably because there’s not much there. Not that strange with Imps. Crack open her brain and it’s going to be properly filed forms and big grey battleships and Empire Day parades full of marching mannequins all the way through. Boring people, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And the hundredth is mynock guano crazy that you _really_ don’t want to see.” She swerved the hovercraft again, taking us through a full barrel roll this time. “I’m not leaving one of my people here because you’re afraid to be harsh with a vornskr. Don’t make me come back there.”   
  
Immediately, Arik said, “No! We’re fine. I’ll take care of it. You can just concentrate on steering – do you see that up ahead? Okay. Phew. That was close.”   
  
He shifted his attention back to me and said, “Sorry about this, ‘Deliya’, but she’s right. It’s my fault they’re even out here.” No posturing with the blaster, but his aim on me remained unshaken. He gave me what was very nearly the most pleading look I had ever seen from a humanoid. Enough to melt a heart of stone, assuming said heart of stone had not been raised by my mother. Tough luck, Arik.   
  
I gave him my most loathing-filled expression, though I found my efforts somewhat hampered by having most of my face covered. This had to be good. Hold that pose, just a little longer. It was not particularly difficult to show fear since I was pretty nervous; the hard part was to make my loss of composure look spontaneous. My lower lip trembled just a little and my shoulders hunched. Arik kept the blaster in place, but was getting the look of someone who had just accidentally stepped on a pittin.   
  
A check of the scenery showed that the mountain range was off to the side. Based on the clearing we had passed through, I had a general idea of where we were relative to the crash site.   
  
Finally, dropping my head down to rest against the side of the hovercraft and closing my eyes, I mumbled, “Off to the right from here.” Total banthawash. Right would lead them into the brambles, where a proper distraction might give me a ghost of a chance of getting away.   
  
Nodding slightly, Arik turned towards the Weequay and yelled, “Left, about 40 degrees. Turn near the rapids.”   
  
Wait. That was actually close to what I thought was correct. How did he – and he shrugged at me and whispered, “You’ve been glancing at those mountains ever since we started. Do you think I’m blind and have no sense of direction?” In the dark, when I was wearing a night-visor, he could see that? I glared at him, angry and embarrassed by my failure. He shook his head. “Hate to do this with you acting like you’ve got a head injury, but you keep trying to get yourself killed…”   
  
For a second I thought he was going for a kill shot, until the blue light of a stunner lanced out. The beam went wide off into the forest and Arik suddenly fell over limp in the corner.   
  
I looked to the driver’s seat with the blaster in my hands. My reflexes had grabbed that for me before I consciously realized Arik was down, or that my hands were now free. Small favors. I had not even felt the binding cord come loose and was unsure exactly how it happened. Up front, Dzidra was cursing and trying to capture something with her left arm while steering with the right. Forgive me if I don’t want to recall what her piloting was like at the time. If I do, I’ll be left staring at the walls and wondering why the afterlife looks like a cramped shuttle room filled with my stuff.   
  
Crouching tensely, I tried to make out what was going on and waited for a chance to get to the driver when we weren’t in danger of smashing into the trees. It seemed that might be never at the rate we were going. The Weequay turned on the lights in an effort to see whatever had invaded the vehicle. I suppose I should have suspected the culprit; it was Prickly again. In all the adrenaline rush of the confrontation with Dzidra, I had lost track of the droid and did not see where it had gone. The sneaky little thing probably hitched a ride by hiding in a dark corner of the hovercraft and I didn’t even notice. If it had been there all along, that explained how the binding on my hands had been cut.   
  
Prickly careened around, dodging the Weequay’s grasp like a very small jakrab in mantid robot’s clothing. The lights on its carapace were all dark, making it much harder to spot. Its attacks were valiant but futile. The sharp blades that had worked on thorny branches soon became dented and twisted from trying to break through the pilot’s tough skin. I had once heard that you could shoot a Weequay point blank with a standard blaster and it wouldn’t do a thing but annoy them. Dzidra seemed to be the living proof.   
  
In the midst of the struggle, the droid damaged some wires near the controls. The whole arrangement there was a mess of different control systems strung together. Prickly’s tampering was evidently a problem, because the panel sparked threateningly and the Weequay slammed on the brakes, cursing. I grabbed Arik to keep him from smacking his head against the wall. That was the last thing he needed at this point. A quick check proved him to be breathing normally and have a steady pulse, at least.   
  
There was a sudden earsplitting shriek so intense that I hunched over and cringed. The droid had been caught and was making its complaints to the management. My night-visor’s light-filtering was the only thing that saved me from being temporarily blinded by the lightning-like flashes that Prickly emitted. Dzidra was at least as affected, curling up with a horrible grimace on her face while refusing to let go of the droid. She swung her hand against the edge of the dashboard and there was a nails-on-chalkboard sound of metal against metal.   
  
The droid’s shrieks went off-key and I could see that it was severely damaged, with half of its body immobile and displaying no lights. With Prickly out of commission, the opportunity to strike would not last much longer. I wished that I had gotten more practice with this kind of scenario back home before everything changed. Given my opponent’s species and the limited space, a blaster was just an encumbrance, so I stowed Arik’s weapon on my belt.   
  
I dragged myself over the barrier to the driver’s side as quickly and gracefully as I could with cold-numbed legs and hands that had been tied securely for a bit too long. Bypassing Dzidra, I went for the heavy blaster at her side, managing to snatch it before she could retaliate. The droid hanging from her arm attempted to jump to me, failed, and fell to the floor. It crawled over to me with remarkable speed and burrowed into my shoe, an arrangement that was much more inconvenient for me than for it.   
  
Though I scrambled to get out, the Weequay managed to catch my left arm on the way and nearly pulled me back into the hovercraft. Wrenching pain ran up and down my arm. I barely managed to twist myself free. Fortunately, I didn’t hit the ground as badly as I could have and was able to roll the landing as I had been drilled so many times. My arm and shoulder protested, but at least there didn’t seem to be any dislocation.   
  
Victory in securing the DL-44 was short-lived. The weapon began to shake and twist in my grip, then tore free with bruising force and floated back to Dzidra’s waiting hands. I ducked and sprinted for cover behind a thorn bush.   
  
The Weequay remained in the hovercraft, much to my surprise. What was she staring at? I tried to get a look while not letting her out of my sight, and only caught the edge of a figure moving through the trees. A large figure. Soft laughter made me turn to Dzidra again, but she appeared as sober as ever. The laugh came again, this time from a different direction. There was a quality about it that almost resembled a sob, and the pitch and duration of sounds was wrong.   
  
Static tingled in my spine and I looked around, half expecting to see one of the Inquisitors step out of the shadows. It would have even been a relief for once.


	18. Something in the Shadows (Day 26 – Part 8)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 8**   
  
In the washed-out light revealed by the night-visor, it was hard distinguish between ordinary shadows and moving objects. The electric feeling of a Force-user in the vicinity kept flickering on and off like someone was playing with a light switch. I was getting goosebumps for reasons that had less to do with the Force twinges and more to do with the evidence that I was being watched from multiple directions. Faint sounds from twigs snapping and leaf litter rustling made it through the constant stream of grating engine noises from the hovercraft. It felt like something was right behind me all the time. No matter how often I turned around, there was nothing there but moving branches and the edges of shadows. The droid in my shoe was agitated, rustling around and making high-pitched squeaks of alarm.   
  
I would like to say that I heard, saw, or felt something in the instant before I was deftly dragged from cover. Truth hurts. I didn’t even get a glimpse before it hit me.    
  
One minute I was warily scanning the trees behind the downed hovercraft. The next I was trapped. It was the smell that got through to me and made it all real, a stench of rotting meat mixed with an almost citrus-like odor that did nothing to lessen the carnivorous nature of the scent.    
  
After thinking “this can’t get worse” all night, this was where I had wound up. So now I did my best not to think any such thing. Where “worse” was located when one started from being stuck in the jaws of a predator the approximate size of a skyhopper, I really did not want to know.   
  
All of my efforts to squirm out of the creature’s grip were fruitless. Trying to move seemed to make it agitated as well, resulting in the animal clamping down with a firmer bite. My right arm took a glancing blow from one of the sharp fangs, though the rest of me was strangely unharmed. Mostly all I felt was bruising and pressure against the injuries I had already picked up that night. There were strong but blunt teeth in the rear part of the creature’s mouth, and sharp incisors and canines towards the front. It must be some sort of omnivore. How embarrassing. If something was going to have the gall to devour me, it ought to at least be a full-time carnivore.    
  
The droid had gone absolutely still, freezing in place against my ankle as if it needed to hide. Its caution was probably unnecessary; I was sure the sharp-edged little machine would be indigestible.   
  
Blaster fire and sounds of what I hoped were not humanoid screams erupted from the direction of the hovercraft. The shots continued without ceasing, so I could only imagine that Dzidra was victorious so far. Not that that did me any good, being over here in my worst yet upside down perch of the night.   
  
I still couldn’t see the animal very well, though by twisting my head I could just make out that it had huge, spiraling tusks that were dotted with razor-edged branches. It almost looked as though someone had gotten overly creative with carving a nisu stag’s antlers and then twisted the results into a nautilus shape. As much as I tried, I could not work my way around to see far beyond where the creature’s bony plate-armored jaws closed around my shoulders. Inconveniently enough, the blasted thing had managed to trap my arm in a position where I could not reach my stolen blaster.   
  
Sounds filled my head that I could not hear so much as feel, making deep rumblings like the digging machines used to excavate the lower levels for new buildings in the city. The sensation made each and every one of my head pains worse. For the first time since the creature had attacked, I heard those sorrowful giggles again.    
  
They melted out of the forest more silently than anything that size ought to, padding along with an odd swinging gait. The animals’ powerful but stocky hind legs seemed to never quite catch up gracefully to their taller forelimbs. For all their ungainly appearance, they were fast. Within seconds, seven golden-eyed faces pressed up so close to me that I could have reached out and touched them if my hands had been free – and if I had no sentimental attachment to said hands. They whimpered, looking at the one who held me with absolute attention. Another bone-jarring growl, even louder than the others, came from the creature. The group scattered, then returned and formed up in a military-straight line. All sat on their haunches with heads bowed towards the ground in an apologetic posture.   
  
Even in the best of light, these animals weren’t going to win any beauty contests. At first glance, the bony armor plates covering their skulls made them look like stripped carcasses that had somehow gotten up and wandered off before decomposition was complete. Their heads were massive and almost as disproportioned as their bodies, with huge rear jaws slowly tapering into a narrower but still strong-looking bear-like snout at the tip. Jagged bony spikes protruded from their muscular shoulders and followed the trail of their vertebrae.    
  
Each of the creatures kept its long, spike-studded tail neatly wrapped around the rear feet while bowing to what I was beginning to think must be the pack leader. Their tufted ears flicked back and forth, possibly listening for the rumbles that I could barely discern. It seemed like each one waited for some kind of signal before they stopped their display and looked up again.    
  
They were far too interested in me. Sickly golden light glinted from their wide, uill-like eyes without respect to where the moonlight fell; the source of the glow seemed to come from within their irises. The shade was an almost perfect match for Ombyrne’s tinted eyes on Dachat. Every time one of the creatures stared at me I could feel the static, although it seemed to fade out again the minute they turned away.   
  
A soft huff from my new non-buddy apparently gave them permission to express themselves.    
  
“EEEEEEeeeeeee!” one screamed, sounding like a bad imitation of a horror film. Its nearest neighbor reached over and grabbed it by the neck, wrestling it into an uncomfortable stooped position until it quieted.   
  
Another cocked its head to the side and said solemnly, “Where’s the hydrospanner how do you expect me to fix stupid droid going to be late to Symbia at this rate how’s the rusted old piece of crud going to be late hydrospanner.”   
  
“Hi doggie doggie hi doggie hi,” another answered in a child-like singsong tone, turning towards the one with the hydrospanner babble.   
  
One with silvered fur and a broken tusk called out, “Neela, Neela? Where are you, Neela?” in a wavering female voice. It had a dramatic twist to its tail, which appeared to have broken and healed wrong. Scars and damaged spikes were visible all over its body and it also avoided placing full weight on its left front paw, which was warped and deformed by some old injury.    
  
The smaller animal who stood close to that one was less polite, letting out a string of single-word profanities. The broken-tusked creature rumbled and the shorter one dipped its head, briefly taking on the chastised posture again.   
  
I had done pretty well at holding my lunch down through the wild ride on the Ugly speeder. Sadly, the combination of stark terror, a digestive system full of caffeine and little else, aching head injuries, and the smell of the creature’s breath finally got to me. The pack of animals watched me empty my stomach, chattering random-sounding comments to each other all the while.    
  
It wasn’t quite pure nonsense if you listened for patterns. Most of the things they said were repeating phrases, bits and pieces of everyday chatter strung together one after the other. Now and then, something would slip through that was rather disturbing. Shrieker, Hydrospanner, and the Pottymouth were the most common offenders. Their ramblings often verged into something far less innocent. Little phrases like “kill it”, “hellbeasts”, and various desperately-worded pleas and threats were interspersed with the rest of the phrases. Broken Tusk seemed to disapprove of these antics, glaring pointedly at the other creatures whenever they became overly enthusiastic.   
  
This was very bad. Somehow, the creepy things sounded even worse when calmly murmured or sung to a popular tune from ten years ago. Experimentally, I attempted to draw my leg up so that I could grab the droid from my shoe.    
  
Instantly, I was shaken roughly and felt a rush of pure liquid ice inside my head. The sensation reminded me of Ombyrne’s attack, and I even struggled to breathe – though I didn’t know whether that effect was just from memory. My vision started to fade out and for a second, I thought I could almost see something.    
  
“See” might be the wrong word. It was not so much a form as an emotional image. The closest I can come to describing it is that it was a bit like looking up at one of the old Stelae of Tasmor in the historical district on Adrastú. It was a little similar to that feeling, one of something ancient and regal looking down at you while being entirely unimpressed.    
  
_Stay still, NOW_.    
  
The command felt almost like Barrett’s brain-shoving communications, except that there was a strange flavor of language about it. I could feel myself trying to mouth the words, my vocal chords struggling to repeat this unfamiliar pattern that felt like it was almost there, almost ready to be understood and used. I tried to bring the information together, hoping against hope that there might be a way to communicate with the creature. It was no use. Chunks of form and meaning rattled around like keys on a chain, but I lacked the ability to make sense out of the pieces.   
  
Though I was nearly as helpless to move as I had been to avoid running from the Anzat, I think I was developing some sort of resistance by this point. Maybe it was because of what had happened earlier. I was unsure if I would be able to make large movements, but found that I could subtly tense and relax muscles. The creature seemed not to notice this, so long as I was careful.    
  
There were small chinks in the armoring of the creature’s face. The skin beneath might or might not be sensitive. Time to wait. I had learned some small part of this game from Ahnjai. A fight did not end when he grasped an arm or leg in his jaws. If dodging and sheer cussedness were what we practiced most, this was the third most frequent: the art of knowing when attention and balance shifted, and when to make a bid for freedom. Ahnjai could have just as easily shattered my bones to a pulp with the strength he had (and some years, it must have been difficult not to.) It now seems strange to me that I never really thought of him as a gentle being.    
  
The pack of creatures began to stir more often, though to my relief the interest seemed not to be related to me this time. Instead they were nudging each other and turning to look off through the trees. I could not hear any more sounds of battle from the clearing and the mechanical sounds of the Ugly craft were gone; either it had finally decided to work or the creatures had disabled it entirely.   
  
Only the faintest sounds of conifer needles underfoot gave away the arrival of more creatures. Two of them paced side by side, cooperating to carry a humanoid form in their mouths. Three shorter creatures guarded the rear and flanks of the pair.    
  
The creatures dropped their cargo, repeating that same eerily formal gesture that the others had used earlier towards my captor. At first I thought it might be Barrett and winced at the thought that I had left him trussed up all those miles back.    
  
More rumbling. I ended up dry heaving again. Whatever this new captive was, “my” creature was very interested. It deposited me none too carefully on the ground and leaned forward to sniff at the fascinating new thing its followers had brought. Meanwhile, the creature rested one of its enormous paws on my back, pressing me down face-first. Now I knew what pine needles tasted like.   
  
I was a little more optimistic now, since I ended up in a position where I was able to finally get a hold of the blaster I had taken earlier – though if wishes were eopies, I would have liked the DL-44 instead. This one had a bit less firepower and I would have to be more precise; it was not ideal given the patchy lighting and the armoring of the creatures.    
  
The creatures’ prize seemed to be only half-conscious. He was speaking, but in a low, hazy tone that told me he must have no idea where he was, and was probably writing off the creatures as part of a dream. We should all be so lucky. I knew the voice almost immediately: Mr. Creepy. Apparently his crew had been unable to find him, after all.   
  
Words came from the pack leader, still in that confusing but familiar language. No direct meanings popped into my head this time, though I still felt like I _should_ understand somehow. I thought of how the presence-feeling went away when the creatures weren’t visually focusing on me. It seemed possible that the translation effect was something that was a result of direct attention. From what I could tell, the leader was engaged in a lively conversation. In spite of my being squished against the ground, I could still identify Broken Tusk from its damaged left paw. The scarred old creature seemed to have a lot to say in its rumbling comments, though it did not (or perhaps could not, I thought) speak whatever language the pack leader did.    
  
As the creature shifted its weight and leaned over to further inspect Mr. Creepy, I was able to move into a better position. Given the right cue, I would make a break for it.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
For visual reference, the creatures from this chapter look something like the [boar-wolves](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Boar-wolf) of Endor with a dash of hyena thrown in. They were also heavily inspired by prehistoric mammals such as the [Entelodon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelodon).    
  



	19. The Pack (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 9)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 9**   
  
“Ughh. Why does the whole world suddenly smell like a Rattataki gladiator circus?” the creatures’ newest captive grumbled. It sounded like he was waking up. Critter breath: better than smelling salts.    
  
From where I had rolled over underfoot, I could see the pack leader sniffing at the spacer’s face. Mr. Creepy (or Inahki, as his companions had called him) looked distinctly uncomfortable. He edged backward and the creature leaned after him, growling. It spoke again, the way it had done towards me earlier. There was still a little familiarity to that language, but nothing like before.    
  
“No,” said Inahki. It was a flat and final answer, unlike the hysterical reactions the creatures had mimicked earlier. The lead creature gaped its jaws inches from Inahki’s face in an obvious threat while Broken Tusk arched up and snarled as well. Every swipe of the aging creature’s tail made a clattering noise as the spines rattled against each other. The other pack members looked twitchy. Likely that they weren’t used to seeing their leader’s authority challenged by mere prey.   
  
I wished with every fiber of my being that the spacer would spontaneously drop dead. Considering our previous acquaintance, I would have gladly shot him if needed – or abandoned him to any bounty hunter who wanted his sorry hide on their kill list. However, there was that little matter of the unspoken agreement among civilized beings. You know, the one that says people should not allow people to be eaten by things that look like demons? I had never given this any particular thought before and was annoyed to find that it was more important than I had realized. My motor functions apparently ran by a less convenient code of ethics than my common sense on this subject.   
  
Of all the people who deserved to be thrown to the wolves, even literally, this guy had to be near the top of the list. Creepy spaceport creeper, following our ship and showing up in the middle of nowhere for some creepy reason. Creeper. Inconvenient, stupid, omnivore snack creeper. Creeping well serve his creepy self right if he ended up as supper for the creepy creatures in the creepy forest.    
  
Broken Tusk approached and leaned close to the leader, who in response bent its head close to the other’s so that they nearly touched. Whatever communication passed between them was silent to my ears, but in the end the older creature turned and paced away, giving me a particularly icy stare on its way. My hands clenched on the blaster and I prayed to some of the more benevolent Grannan deities – ones that I don’t believe in, strictly speaking – that I had succeeded at keeping the weapon hidden from sight. The younger creatures with their fidgeting and babbling tendencies were unsettling, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was the grizzled old predator who would tear me to shreds in a heartbeat if it recognized the danger. He or she could not have survived to be that bedraggled without picking up a little ruthlessness.   
  
The two creatures who had carried Inahki stood up attentively as Broken Tusk returned to the group and exchanged quiet growls with them. After that, they turned and drove all of the smaller pack members further back away from where the leader held Inahki and I. Pottymouth hesitated and rattled its tail at being exiled from all things interesting and potentially tasty, but loped off after being snapped at by one of the two hulking delivery-monsters.   
  
Shimmering metal gleamed in the darkness as Inahki swiped at the pack leader’s nose with one hand, the contact making a sharp, grating shriek. The gauntlet he wore – a clawed and silvery thing that reminded me of a Twi’lek ceremonial doashim costume – glanced off of bone plating instead. The creature shoved him back to the ground with the broad side of its snout and he let out a Zeltron curse which I will neither translate nor admit to knowing. Let’s just say that the species’ insults are countless but their true profanities are few and viciously honed.    
  
Inahki waved something that trailed sparks in the creature’s face. The animal grimaced and lunged sideways, then slowed down to examine the new object warily. At first I thought it was another weapon, but a clearer look showed that it was – almost unbelievably to my tired eyes – a drink container, much like the one I had seen near the ship. I was baffled. The spacer held the container against his face and some sort of pale, actinic energy sparked between his skin and the item. The glow and ambient crackling noise coming from the can increased. Okay, that explained everything. Not really.    
  
Taking advantage of the commotion, I pried myself loose from the distracted animal’s paw and rolled over to a better vantage point. The side of my foot twinged when the motion pressed it against my inconvenient droid passenger.    
  
It was hard to pinpoint a target, since the creature was in constant motion. I took the chance of firing several shots at its stomach, to no visible effect. That earned me a threatening jaw snap that I dodged by a hair’s breadth.    
  
An icy shiver between my shoulder blades and the low humming of subterranean voices told me that my aggression against the leader hadn’t gone unnoticed by the pack. I expected a joint attack, and yet Broken Tusk and the two big bruisers held the others in check. The former noticed my glance and grimaced, showing every tooth in its skeletal head. Some of them were missing, though not nearly enough for my peace of mind.   
  
Instead of coming back for a second strike at me, the pack leader turned and jabbed down at Inahki with one paw. The impact was accompanied by an ominous crunch. Punctured lungs, here we go, I thought with a wince. Sticking around looked like a worse decision by the minute.   
  
Beast and prospective evening meal faced off in a silent staring contest. I could see the creature’s body sway and for an instant hoped that I had managed a kill shot after all. Then its shadow fell off. At least, it appeared that way.   
  
What I actually saw was this: the creature toppled over and fell limp on the ground, while a moving image that looked entirely like an ink-colored scale model flung itself forward. The shadow’s jaws closed over Inahki’s neck in a move that would have torn his throat out in a solid form. Inahki made a harsh sound that could have been a scream, but he lacked the breathing capacity for it.    
  
I heard a sharp crack and covered my face to protect myself from the brilliant fireball explosion as the electrified drink container that Inahki had been holding blew up. Fiery sparks rained down in all directions. Some of the embers from the explosion landed on me and I rolled to put out the flames. The shadow creature wavered back and then rushed forward again, its outline breaking up into droplets and ripples as though it were made of water.    
  
When I was able to locate it again, I shot the shadowy thing through the rib cage about two dozen times before I gave up and decided to save the power pack. If the question should ever come up, freaky not-shadow beats blaster bolt. This was not covered in the science curriculum at Briareus Tulekahju Memorial Sub-Adult School. Clearly an oversight.   
  
Gradually, the shadow beast morphed into an indigo-black cloud that wrapped around Inahki and then disappeared. Inahki fell completely still as though he were asleep – or had expired. The creatures on the fringe of the clearing stared at the spectacle enraptured. Broken Tusk thundered at me when I tried to move closer and see if the man was even alive.   
  
I was not feeling so great myself. Nothing on its own felt serious except for possibly the knocks to the head, but it was all starting to add up. The adrenaline kick caused by the recent disasters could not last forever. My mother’s warnings about hypothermia were playing on a loop in my mind. Though I didn’t feel like I was going to drop momentarily, sometimes that is how it gets you (or so I had always heard.)   
  
Inahki began wheezing and coughing. He lifted his head and stared at me with a look that I could not read. The dark cloud that had settled on him seemed to be bleeding out here and there; when he breathed out, the mist was that same nameless shadowy color. Something was expected to happen, but I was unsure what or how to avert it. The crawly feeling of being watched increased. Coughing again, Inahki suddenly went into a full-blown spasm, thrashing around and making choking noises. I thought he was having a seizure or something and instinctively went to keep him from damaging himself.    
  
The faintest sensation of air rushing by was my warning. I dodged out of the way and saw the massive form of Broken Tusk bearing down on me.    
  
Given the way Isander described it, I had always thought that it would be comforting to have Force senses during a fight. Now, through the sensations that these creatures gave off – be it through the Force or some other means – I felt like I was getting a taste of that experience. I did not care for it. Broken Tusk’s moves were telegraphed to some extent, the intensity of its focus on me hinting at which way the creature was moving next. It wasn’t enough to save me. Inexorable did not even begin to describe the opponent I faced. Old or not, there was nothing tired or clumsy about this animal. I was barely, just barely, able to keep ahead – but even then, I could feel that my exhaustion would not let me continue for very long.   
  
Keenly aware that my blaster would not hold its charge forever, I used my shots with care. It was not bad shooting, especially considering my physical condition after a night of being battered by the elements and everything else. If nothing else, I’m proud of that. At least one of the shots hit a vulnerable spot that I had identified earlier, one of the creases in the creature’s facial plates. It was not due to luck, either. I hit what I had aimed at. The creature howled in outrage and pawed at its face.   
  
What can I say? I believe in celebrating the little victories. It was small enough. Broken Tusk was back on my tail before I could make an escape, charging much faster than seemed possible for its enormous frame. Grabbing my weapon from my hand with iron-jawed delicacy and tossing it away, the hunter blocked my exit and had me pinned to the ground within seconds.    
  
Eye to eye and so close that its reeking breath misted the air in my face, Broken Tusk demanded, “What are you hiding? Think that you can keep secrets from Lord Zarza, do you?” The deep voice echoed as though we were standing in a cavern.    
  
Clamping down across my shoulders and neck, it shook me and growled. The horrible something-right-behind-me sensation swept through me and my bruised neck protested. It occurred to me that this was almost the same “you just see here, young whippersnapper” move that had been used on the smaller creatures. Despite the rage in its voice, it was being somewhat careful. I remembered quite well how much carnage Ahnjai created when he attacked the pirates at Rafnkell. This creature (or whatever it was), being that much larger – well, it would be the work of an instant for it to dismember me. Instead, it was keeping me around for the moment.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
The [doashim](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Doashim) is a sharp-clawed predator from Ryloth. The costume Lydia refers to is noncanon. It includes a headdress with hollow horns (easy enough to fit for a Twi’lek), clawed gloves, and various other bits of finery. If festivals with snazzy costumes and dancing are not popular on Ryloth, I’d be surprised!   
  
Other, belated note: I would like to thank darksideyesplease for his beta/discussion on plot stuff from July-ish (not really chapter specific from what I recall.) 


	20. Sithspawn (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 10)

**41 AE, **Month 1, Day 26 –**** Part 10  
  
When the creature finally dropped me, I lay on the ground fighting for breath. Dizziness and another surge of head pain were the last things needed at the moment, so naturally there they were in full glory. It was probably just as well that I did not have the energy to throw up any more. If a herd of banthas had stampeded over me and backed up to finish the job, the results could not have felt much worse. Scrambling back to something resembling a defensive pose took longer than it should have done, and I was terrified that I would pass out. Reflexes were one thing, but there was a disturbing tremor in my stance that wouldn’t go away. I was fast approaching my physical limits and had been for a while. My energy stores were just plain shot, and my ability to concentrate had been fizzling out since Dzidra clonked me over the head. Probably a concussion or something. Not good.  
  
That moment of exhaustion seemed to allow the creature to peer right into my thoughts. It sorted through my memories without bothering to suppress the chaos as it overturned a lifetime’s worth of information. I found myself remembering old conversations, songs that had not been popular in years, bits and pieces of a holodrama from last month, and all kinds of other things. Most of it seemed like useless information, but it was interesting that the strange being was able to access what Lesedi claimed was blocked off from her senses.What “Lord Zarza” found instead was evidently offensive, judging from the way its lips curled back over yellowed fangs. Scary, though it also had me flinching with a residual “call the vet now” instinct from the last couple of years of part-time farming. There was some really nasty gum rot on display. Never again will I doubt the need for the Meuric household’s nearly compulsive tooth-brushing routine for their tusk cats.   
  
_“_ You would come here, where the betrayers left us to _rot_ and raise your hand _against MY Qalydon_? When you carry the legacy of our Empire in your empty, thin-blooded head?” Zarza’s ears lay flat and its eyes were blazing. It seemed impossible to break away from that stare. “The grey ones following after the memory of that sickly Human, they have not a shade of our glory – but even they know the order of life. Weak ones must fall before the strong _._ ”  
  
Apparently Zarza was sentient. I wasn’t sure whether I had expected that or not. It was speaking Basic; the movements of its throat matched up to the rhythm of the words. The emphasis placed on words and pauses was odd in places, as though the language were foreign to the speaker – known but rarely practiced, a bit like my Bothese and Kuat Osyund. There was something about the way it said “Human” that was… different. Like we were some sort of exotic animal that was rarely seen. No doubt humans were sparse on the ground on this world, though I wondered if the aliens had been born here or elsewhere. If the “grey ones” were Imperials, there had to be some outside contact. Why Zarza was so dismissive and what all the other rambling was about, now that was a complete enigma.   
  
Perhaps these beings were crash survivors driven to a stone age existence and had developed some strange mythology of their own. Isolated communities in hardship conditions can go strange fast. Just look at my maternal ancestors on Galtea. Over five hundred languages and at least fifty more-or-less separate religions spawned in the first half millenium without galactic contact. They still have communities out in the islands that are in hiding from the Empire. No, not the Galactic Empire. The Skelusk Empire. What’s that, you don’t remember the Skelusks? Neither does anyone else, except for these people. Mum’s homeworld is special that way sometimes.  
  
The alien let out a carrion-scented, disgusted sigh. “Unsuitable. But I shall have to make do. Now, let us see what I can do with this mess… such a waste.” The yellow eyes that stared at me from inches away had firefly sparks dancing in their depths and bloodshot red patterns around the edges. “You were barely using this at all _._ Fascinating work. I wonder how they… now I see. _Very_ interesting.” Just what one wants to hear, really.  
  
Holding me in place with one paw (which had to be nearly a meter in circumference; these monsters made tusk cats look like itty bitty week-old pittins by comparison), the alien curled up on the ground beside me and swept its spiny tail around so that its face and underbelly were covered. It appeared to have decided to just take a nap on the spot. As I carefully tried to work my way out of its hold, I quickly found that my vision was cloudy and I could not quite manage to get a full breath of air. Moving was difficult, as though my limbs weighed a lot more than they had before. I coughed, remembered what happened to Inahki not two minutes ago, and felt a shiver of fear run through me.   
  
No way. I grabbed for the small droid in my shoe – the only sharp object I had to hand, the stunblade having inconveniently ended up in Dzidra’s custody. Zarza was unresponsive to this, not reacting with the aggressive lunge that I had come to expect. The alien gazed at the half-lit, half-deactivated droid, which had stopped a few inches from my intended target, its eye (given the size it should have been hard to miss at that range and I was getting desperate.) My muscles were locked up as though I had just fallen into ice water.   
  
Previously, the alien had only been picking through the contents of my mind. That was nothing compared to its next move, which was to come in and attempt to make itself at home: rearrange the furniture, bring in its own baggage (and was there ever a lot of it, from the pieces I can recall), and shuffle that annoying former tenant off to a quiet corner. I am glad that there is no visual record of that moment, since I was probably breathing out the same shadow gunk as the unfortunate Mr. Creepy. The possibility is enough material for insomnia without knowing for certain. All I can remember of my physical surroundings at that point is a vague gray haze.  
  
Impressions from the alien’s life swirled through my mind. The strength of its – no, her – absolute fury battered at me, opening the door to a flood of emotions and images. Some things made sense and some did not; memories might be clear, detailed sequences or little fragments that were vague and jumbled. Words sometimes were easy to understand – a few names that I’ve recorded here might even be close to their original forms, though there is no way of checking – and sometimes were near gibberish.  
  
She was Lord Zarza Karmazyn of the great Empire, though not the one that I knew. She could make the insolent scream their dearest secrets to the skies and drain the lives of her enemies without laying a hand on them. She was _good_ and would like a nice thigh bone to chew on; she deserved one. A fresh-killed bone full of savory, delicious, energizing marrow.   
  
She had been abandoned, rejected for reasons she could not comprehend.   
  
She and her pack had been good warbeasts, strong and well-trained. They did not understand when their Masters left them on the battlefield. Some of the floating metal beasts had died and the Masters had all gone with the remainder – but they left some of the pack behind, how could they do that? Warbeasts were small enough, they could fit on the transports with the Masters. They were sure of it. Instead, they had been left alone and the Masters had not come back. The castaways were heartbroken, bereft of affectionate scratches behind their shoulder-plates and forced to hunt or forage for their every meal. They were capable of fending for themselves, but they were lonely for familiar people and places. The land was crueler and harder than any test that the Masters had ever put to them, punishing the creatures with terrible cold and extracting every last drop of energy for any scrap of food it had to offer.   
  
She had been betrayed, her life taken and the memory of her victories allowed to fade to ashes.   
  
Zarza had been part of an invasion force that followed a new hyperspace route to the Deep Core. They were Sith. Honest to goodness, monsters under the bed, curses and black magic Sith. (Or at least that’s what the mutant boar-wolf whatsit that was camping out in my head “told” me in very confusing terms. I’m recording this as though I believe my own recall of memories from an alien sentience – or two. Memories that I thought I saw while in a questionable, recently head-bashed, illegal-to-pilot state of consciousness. Needless to say, it’s all messed up.)   
  
At any rate, Zarza commanded a group of warriors (extremely ugly warriors some of them, way worse than the scrapings they haul out of the Slobbering Jerba on a Notronday night) on a large, outdated (by now, thank all the gods and ancient stellar architects and telekinetic parasites) warship called the _Karasu_. Lost and cut off from reinforcements after the main fleet was defeated, the _Karasu_ and its companion ships had not given up the fight but dug in their heels and fought for every inch of this unfamiliar region of space where the stars huddled together like terrified herdlings.   
  
Things went from bad to worse when their leader Lord Viant went out of his usual slightly strange mental orbit and veered off into the realm of the truly bizarre. The crew hardly noticed at first. They were old hands at dealing with the issues of moody, unpredictable Sith Lords. Privately, Zarza thought that the Sith of mostly human blood were prone to be disturbed from the time they were born. Powerful but prone to violent mood swings and eccentric beliefs. Others could have those problems too, of course; however, she saw the extremes much less often. No one of her own type of hybrid had ever told her that he heard the Left-Handed One speaking death prophecies in the sound of the auxilary engines. It wasn’t long before something fatal happened to Viant; it was ambiguous exactly what. Zarza suspected foul play, but was distracted by more immediate problems.  
  
Lord Viant’s death had left them with an unstable situation. His apprentice was supposed to be next in line and was of high-born status, both of them being descended from some humans who were of special significance. Unfortunately, the apprentice (whose name was an enormous bowl of word salad) did not really have the chops to back up his assigned role, and it became clearer the more independent decisions he had to make after Viant died.   
  
This apprentice was also not as wonderful of a duelist as he thought. Most of the other Sith were not inclined to mourn when Qalydon electrocuted the useless twit and put him out the airlock. Far from getting in trouble, this seemed to assure his place at the top of the food chain. The Sith had some sense of military discipline – mostly that those farther down the hierarchy should have more of it and thus needed choking – but when it came to regulating power squabbles they were just plain messy.   
  
In spite of their difficulties, somehow these stray Sith managed to amass quite a few captured ships, mostly by striking at the borders of patrolled areas and fleeing with the goods before help could arrive (a tactic that reminded me of the pirates of my own experience.) This stolen fleet allowed them to begin conquering territory along the hyperspace lanes that they were able to use – limited in range compared to the modern routes, but then so were those of their opponents. The enemy had fallen before Qalydon’s fleet and there had been discussions. The crew of the _Karasu_ and the other ships began to speculate what might happen if and when they re-established contact with the Empire. They might be able to carve out their own territory, if the leaders at home had the sense to recognize their achievements.   
  
Then they had been lured into a trap. The Endless Void take _that one_ (there was a very specific insult that Zarza used here, but it was long and involved references from her language that I could not even begin to understand) and the idiot Humans she’d lured into her schemes. Sabotage let the enemy’s fire break through and send the _Karasu_ crashing down to this backwater planet, killing all aboard.   
  
The most powerful of them persisted as spirits, but they waited in vain for contact from the living. No one had returned to claim their bodies and bear their spirits back to the tombs where they belonged. The absence of any searchers told a tale in itself: either the Sith were so beaten that they had never been able to return, or else the dead had been deemed unworthy of an honored burial. Instead of resting among their ancestors they sank into the remains of the ship’s wreckage, forgotten by former friends and enemies alike.   
  
She had gone a bit mad in those first years, obsessed with the constant task of reaffirming her connection to the space where she was anchored. It was a tiny place to spend millenia, a pitiful scattering of debris on the ground. The only thing that kept her going was a burning determination not to fade away in this last place that she could claim. The others were much the same and were not sociable company. Having to establish themselves in a site unprepared for such haunting made them territorial and afraid of intruders. Even her lover in life, her clever and animated Qalydon, had blindly fought with her over boundaries that guarded nothing but disintegrating metal shards.  
  
The warbeast had been very old when she discovered the bones of a metal creature scattered in the valley that its fiery death had created. Drawn by the Marrow Scent that resided in all things (but especially in the best prey), she patrolled the edges of the wreck. There was no good hunting to be had here. It was a still, lifeless place where no other animal would set foot. The remains of the passengers had been ravaged by fire and time. However, there was something else that set her heart to racing and made her ears prick up hopefully.   
  
Her Master was here. She remembered many Masters of various humanoid forms and markings, but this one was _hers_ : a tall female with blood-colored skin and a metal arm, who rode her into battle and came to visit her with gifts of sweet bread rolls and braid-haired biped whelps when she had been very good. The warbeast could feel her Master’s presence in the Scent, but could not seem to locate her physical body. She paced in confusion, turning over the wreckage of the ship and upsetting some strange things that felt like Masters and looked like shadows. They flew at her and screamed that she should go away or she would be sorry. She stayed.   
  
Zarza had been frightened and confused when the intruder came. The rage and fear of the other spirits had sent her into a defensive state. It bothered her that the intruder had chosen her space to invade, even after making its way around the whole of the crash site. She attacked with her mind and even tried to summon lightning (this no longer seemed to work for her after her death; it was frustrating.) The intruder refused to leave, and she realized on closer inspection that this was not one of the enemy. Merely an animal, in spite of its Force strength and relative intelligence. As she watched it through the Force in the following days, she began to feel a sense of recognition. It was impossible, and yet this stubborn beast reminded her so strongly of her beloved Dris. The memory of hours spent with her nichitelakosti – of training her, brushing her fur, and preparing her gear for battle – brought a wave of homesickness worse than any she had felt since the crash.  
  
Reaching out tentatively, she found the old Force link that she and Dris used to communicate. It _was_ her long-lost war mount. Lord Zarza, champion of a vast legion and slayer of Jedi, would probably have cried if she were still able. Dris greeted her ecstatically, overjoyed to have rediscovered her Master. The years of separation had been difficult for both of them. Zarza had not wanted to leave her nichitelakosti behind during the retreat from that disaster of a battle. It was necessary and there was no possibility of wasting resources to get Dris back, but that did not make it painless. Long after the first grief faded, she still wondered sometimes whether her old friend had survived. It was not the reason why she had fought so hard during Qalydon’s campaign to reclaim the Eye of the Stars. She could not deny that it was in the back of her mind, though.  
  
Although the reunion was appreciated, she was concerned about Dris. The nichitelakosti was not as young as she had once been. Several days without food and water had taken their toll on an already malnourished body. Her packmates gathered at the edge of the crash site. They would eat one who had succumbed to weakness, but were so far unwilling to risk the shadows and the eeriness of the wreck. Zarza struggled with panic at the thought of being left alone again. That could not be allowed.   
  
She poured all the energy she could spare into the link with Dris, giving her the strength to get up and hunt. Nichitelakosti were designed to feed on the lives of their victims, primarily taking this sustenance from the marrow of their bones. (They also happen to have an exceptionally vivid sensory memory when it comes to food. Ugh. Which is worse, the grossout factor of the whole thing or the fact that I now keep craving some _really_ rare meat?) Through her connection with Dris, Zarza was able to teach her how to draw the maximum possible amount of essence and use it to extend her life. She could not make Dris immortal, but she could ensure that she would live for a very long time. It helped that the nichitelakosti was a different kind of animal in the first place, making her an ideal subject for such preservation techniques. (As with Zarza’s favorite insult, there was a specific phrase for what these nichitelakosti were that made them unique; it just did not make much sense and refused to stick in my memory.)  
  
Her tiny plot of wreckage was boring and Dris’s loyalty made her an easier focus to haunt. It was not long before she abandoned her makeshift “crypt” entirely for the better company of her old warbeast. They made a good team, Zarza enhancing the nichitelakosti’s already respectable cunning and Dris providing senses that allowed Zarza to experience the world more directly than she could as a ghost alone. Together, they ate well. Younger pack members who had been hassling Dris over every carcass were put in their place by her restored strength.   
  
If Zarza occasionally had moments where she was uncertain whose thought had just passed through their increasingly shared mind, she did not worry about it much. She had always been more comfortable opening her perceptions to Dris than many of the higher-ranking Sith were with their own creatures. Many preferred distance from their enemies and disliked sharing in the sensation of a warbeast’s jaws crunching down on blood and bone. Zarza welcomed it. In her opinion, this was why she had success with such an “unmanageable” species of mount.   
  
At first, the other Sith in the wreckage were as wary of her alliance with the creatures as they had been in life. Her persistence eventually wore down the uncertainty. One by one, the shades of her allies began to venture out and form connections with the pack. They learned Zarza’s ways of extending survival (those who did not already have knowledge of such a specialty themselves) and relished in the presence of others with whom they could socialize, quarrel, and compete.   
  
The Sith were not peaceful, but few truly thrived in isolation. The Dark Lord who planted his or her tomb in lonely splendor on some forsaken world was a rarity, and probably had a more than average amount of Human in their ancestry.   
  
She did not really notice a particular point in time when most of the other Sith started to lose their identities, their original memories and sentience dissolving into the nature of their counterparts. She only knew that the day came when the only useful conversations she could have with them were through Force nudges or very simple vocal exchanges, spoken in the animal vocabulary of deep growls that the nichitelakosti used among themselves. The animals’ rumbling speech allowed them to exchange signals from miles away, well beyond the range where most of them could Force communicate. This was much more suitable for the lifestyle of the nichitelakosti than any other language. Centuries of genetic manipulation had given the warbeasts the ability to imitate sentient speech and learn a few key phrases. The haunted creatures retained the ability to mimic (which even the others could do, to a lesser extent.) However, most of their sentient-origin speech was reduced to repeating words they had learned from stranded spacers with extraordinarily bad luck.   
  
Zarza had some idea why this might have happened. The nichitelakosti were complex animals, but their brains were never meant to support full sentience. As the Sith spent more time in their minds, they were slowly becoming subject to the same constraints. The merging had not affected her that way yet. Zarza ignored the days when she could not quite remember something important and her only name was a sound created by humming just so. Going back to the wreck would be worse than dying.   
  
The worst time she remembered was when Qalydon became dismayed by the changes and fled back to his old haunting ground. The host creature Qalydon had linked himself to was strongly affected by the Sith’s mood. He refused to leave and would barely eat, even when brought fresh kills. She did not know what brought Qalydon out of his despair, though she thought it had nothing to do with her since he had been far away for all those weeks. When he finally ventured out and rejoined the pack, she found herself watching him closely. Part of it was worry for him and part was ingrained suspicion from her former life. She made sure to stay nearby and speak to him often, as much to make sure that she remembered her own language as to keep an eye on him. Over the following years, he remained more withdrawn than she recalled of his former self. Zarza and he were the only ones to retain most of their intelligence, though the others were something more than average nichitelakosti. The ones who lost their memories still outlived the non-possessed creatures who lived and died alongside them.   
  
In the rare event of a downed ship, she and Qalydon sometimes attempted to possess members of the crew. (I would call it possession; she objected to this and found my attempts to describe it to myself – based on scary holodramas made up by people who she assured me had no idea what they were talking about – very far from her understanding of just what this thing was. Everything that was related to her powers seemed to have its own special terms that were not translatable into Basic or into my experiences in general.) Whatever one might call it, it did not work. She blamed this on the weakness in the Force of the subjects, but little by little a seed of doubt crept into her mind. What if she was not what she had once been?  
  
I didn’t just have doubts. I was dead certain that Zarza-and-Dris was not quite all there. There was a difference in the quality of her more recent thoughts. They were shorter, more sensory and intense but often lacking huge pieces of context. That was actually the easiest way to divide things, since she seemed to have nearly lost all sense of time and sequencing. If it was more story-like, it had to be older and if it was overwhelmingly strong in taste, smell, or the other senses of the nichitelakosti it must be new. Newer memories were almost impossible to place into any kind of order.  
  
There were frustratingly incomplete, worrying little chunks of information in there.   
  
She remembered ambushing a rider on a speeder bike and dragging him off the vehicle, the sound and smell of the machine exploding as it ran onward into a rock wall, and the discovery that her prey – bleeding profusely from his shoulder – tasted disappointingly of bitter vegetables. She dropped him like a child’s suddenly-boring toy and went running off to – somewhere.   
  
That was Zelenus, I thought, from the pale hair and overall build. Zarza/Dris had no particular interest in what became of him, of course. People just weren’t important that way. They were entertaining, but not real in the same way as her pack. Lunch and chasable chew toys, all of them. Forgotten the minute they were no longer making interesting squeaky noises. Sometimes they did remind her of Zarza’s former life, but it wasn’t exactly in a way that was sentimental towards the squeaky-toys. It just made her long fiercely for a spicy, near-boiling cup of chira (which was not really like caff at all and hard to describe, except that she’d give her fourth lung for it without a second thought after all these centuries.)   
  
She’d seen Odon, too, and Bramer. Odon was barely there, a flash of dark clothing and a brief moment of baffled annoyance before moving on to better targets. The memory of Bramer was stronger. She was standing in the river; her height allowed her to ford the waters and peer over the surface with ease. And above, perching on a rock in the stream – one that was way too small for comfort, given the circumstances – was Bramer. I could feel her senses picking up on scent, emotions, heartbeat, as she circled the rock. Wafting through the Marrow Scent were traces of things that were just as fascinating as the potential for dinner. She sensed immediate mortal fear, but also other, more vital sources of power. There was a hint of anger there, though it was directed far away and he did not seem to channel it towards the present danger. More fascinating was the grief: a deep, helpless, raw abyss of churning misery that drew from loss and the fear of loss. It glowed like a star to any creature able to sense as she could.   
  
Zarza/Dris drew closer, calling out in the voices of his memories. They were not difficult to catch, so close to the surface and so furiously suppressed. It was simpler than true speech, to draw out the listener’s own demons this way. No rephrasing or interpretation needed. She did not need to really comprehend the words she called, pleading for help, threatening, accusing, dredging up whatever lurked under his defenses.   
  
I feel awkward about that now. Nothing specific came through, but still… there’s something a bit awful about seeing someone’s fears get dragged out and put on parade by a talking boar-wolf with halitosis. Even if you don’t know what was said. It’s way too much information all around. I mean, it’s a screwed up galaxy and most of us are screwed up in our own special ways. But we – the sort of people who sign themselves up to spend who knows how many years learning to be Imperial agents for who knows what results, in spite of the fact that there’s not all that much Empire left these days – try to pretend otherwise, since it’s not very Imperial to go around moping about our depressing secrets. At least, I think that’s how it works. Things aren’t really the same for my generation and I don’t know who knows anymore what it should be like. And I’m pretty sure that it would not be okay to go around hugging other students because of mean things that the alien that tried to redecorate my brain might have said.   
  
Because of how her memories were, I didn’t even find out until later exactly how Bramer got out of that mess, or how he got into it for that matter. However, she did remember an awful taste that clogged her nose and made her bury her face in the water, trying to wash away the burning in her eyes and mouth. That was why she remembered Bramer so well; she _really_ wanted a piece of his larynx over that. Tear gas, as I heard from him while we all struggled to stumble from our reinforcements’ hovercraft to the ship. Anyway, that was later.  
  
She had seen the tail end of the fight near the _Draigon_ , but her impressions were no clearer than my own. The nichitelakosti had been more interested in the lights and sound, the feel of the Marrow Scent, and the energy given off by the combatants. The reasons why these beings fought did not matter. All the pack knew was that it was time to chase the bikes and hovercraft that zoomed off in various directions. Chasing flying things was _fun_ , especially if the drivers yelped or said new and interesting words.   
  
There was a fragment, too, of an earlier conversation with Barrett. Mental conversation. That shouldn’t have seemed odd anymore, but it did. He’d contacted Qalydon and told him that a ship full of fugitives would soon be arriving, along with one carrying several grey ones and a prisoner. According to the plan, which was laid out in insulting detail, the criminals would have to pass through the pack’s territory to reach the prisoner. The pack could have any of the fugitives they wanted as long as they brought one particular Zeltron hybrid to the grey ones unharmed. She and Qalydon were sent visuals and an impression of his scent (much more useful, even if the Anzat’s sense of smell was not as gifted as theirs.) She laughed and told the Anzat to go hunting himself. “Earn your own dinner for once, lazy guts!” she said with a snort.  
  
Everything was so confusing and out of sequence that I didn’t quite believe it when I saw Lesedi walking towards me at a deliberate, slightly limping pace. 

 

******** Notes:   
  
Kuat Osyund is just another name for the [Kuat language](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kuat_language).  
  
The Left-Handed One of Lord Viant’s premonitions was [Typhojem](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Typhojem), a Dark Side associated deity of the ancient Sith. His reporting this was kind of the equivalent of someone who starts talking about their personal experiences with angels and demons all the time. Not what any Sith leader’s subordinates really want to hear when they’re stuck in unfamiliar territory…  
  
Notronday is my substitution for [Benduday](http://%20http//starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Benduday) in the Empire’s weekly calendar, since the original day name refers to the [ Order of Dai Bendu ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Order_of_Dai_Bendu). Can’t have weekdays associated with Jedi founders, really! Think of the children.   
  
The Karasu (the wrecked Sith ship) was a [ Sith personnel carrier ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_personnel_carrier), though I imagine it looking more streamlined and less like a bunch of spiky Legos compared to the wiki picture.   
  
[ Qalydon ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Qalydon)is the name of an Outer Rim planet with not much detail, except that it has mysterious ruins and that the New Sith Wars were called “the Curse of Qalydon.” I thought it would be interesting if the name of both the planet and the supposed curse referred to an older historical figure. The word Qalydon also reminded me of the Calydonian Boar .   
  
The nichitelakosti are an OC species, but belong to the group of critters referred to as [Sithspawn ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sithspawn) in the EU – which includes pretty much any being or animal mutated by Sith techniques. These particular Sithspawn are distant relatives of the tuk'ata ([http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tuk'ata](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tuk%27ata)), but with plenty of other Frankenstein-style additions. They were engineered to be war mounts rather than guard animals. Their name is derived from my mangling of the phrase “ničiteľa kostí”, which Google Translate gave as an English-to-Slovak translation for “destroyer of bones.” (One of my ways to name things is to enter a word or phrase into a translation site and see what pops up for various languages.)  
  
** Sithspawn **  
  
One of the things that I tried to achieve when showing Zarza’s memories through Lydia’s viewpoint is that certain parts of the Sith language and culture are very difficult to translate for a modern Basic-speaking human. Having Zarza’s mind mixed up with Dris’ makes it more jumbled as well.   
  
This is why Lydia is able to understand “Sith”, a concept she has encountered in at least a garbled form, but doesn’t really get Zarza’s profanity or the categories for types of Sith-mutated creatures. She can process the name of the nichitelakosti species, since a name for a kind of animal isn’t as difficult of an idea to understand. She doesn’t get the category, which is based on how the mutation is achieved, what Dark Side techniques are used, what kind of Force energy remains incorporated into the animal, how it uses the Force if it does so, and all of that. The idea was that if you don’t have some idea of what a Sithspawn actually is as a product of Sith alchemy, then the word for how it’s made just doesn’t make sense. (I didn’t decide what the word in question actually is, but it has to do with the creatures’ vampiric abilities. Like the terentateks (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Terentatek>), they feed on Force energy by devouring it along with their victims.)  
  
The nichitelakosti have various kinds of communication. As we’ve seen, Zarza and Qalydon are able to communicate directly with individuals by telepathy and by speaking aloud, if they so choose. They can pull Basic words from another’s mind or they can make the Sith language understood by Basic speakers. This happens in different degrees and works best when they are focused and concentrating on that person (Force-sensitivity of any kind helps this process; Sith has a certain universal-translation quality to Force-users if they concentrate on it.) All nichitelakosti also have an ability to mimic voices, much like a parrot or myna bird. This is why they repeat things they have heard from stranded spacers, even though they don’t actually have fully developed language abilities.   
  
The way they vocalize at each other in low-pitched sounds is drawn from how certain real animals communicate with infrasound. (There's a short overview of how it's used by elephants here: <http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/infrasound.html>; they can stay in touch with other elephants over great distances this way.) It seemed like an interesting trait for a dangerous creature because infrasound is believed to have weird effects on humans at certain intensities. Apparently, it can induce a really disturbing feeling and might be the natural cause for some people's experiences of haunted places: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Infrasonic_17_Hz_tone_experiment> . If I were being completely accurate, Lydia might not be able to hear those noises at all (though she would still probably feel the effects.) In this case, it's hand-waved that they range upwards into what humans can hear; it's just that a lot of the sound is below that threshold.   
  
** Sith  **  
  
There is a lot of data to sift through about the Sith, so this version may have quite a few mistakes.   
  
All of the Sith ghosts here are from the era of the Great Hyperspace War (about 5000 BBY), and their group was one of several that were scattered around the galaxy after the Sith lost that conflict.   
  
Zarza calls the Deep Core region the Eye of the Stars. The Sith had been an isolated civilization for centuries; the majority descended from the original Sith species and from Ajunta Pall’s group of human Jedi exiles. The Sith were only able to reach the rest of the GFFA after following some scouts from the Old Republic. Therefore, they might have had their own names for the new places they saw, such as the Deep Core (which they did travel through, since an [ important battle ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Koros_Major)of the Great Hyperspace War happened there.)  
  
M ost of the Sith crew, including Zarza, were Sith/human hybrids. This was possibly the most common species among the upper classes in the Golden Age Sith Empire based on how their [ council ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_Council)looked right before the war. Lord Viant and his apprentice were descendants of Ajunta Pall; this was why their ancestry was considered relevant by Zarza.   
  
Zarza wasn’t all that overwhelmed with reverence for the old Dark Lords’ descendants, which shows a change that may have happened at some point – when Ajunta Pall and company took over, it was a humans-only Sith Lord rulership, later there were hybrids like [Ludo Kressh ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ludo_Kressh)among the council, and by the time of the Great Galactic War about 1300 years later, at least some Sith like [Praven ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Praven) evidently took pride in their Sith species heritage. This is probably actually due to inconsistency between books and games, but it does seem plausible that there would be some social change in the hundreds of years that the Sith Empire existed.  
  
Lydia’s recognition of the Sith might seem a little unusual and it’s one of the things that were added and removed a few times before I decided to keep it. Most of the books hint at there being very little widespread knowledge about the  Jedi and Sith at any point in history. However, it made sense for the Sith to have a place in folklore and mythology. This would make them at least a little familiar to someone with an interest (assuming the Sith weren’t wiped from the books along with the Jedi – always possible, since Sidious was never public with his Sithliness), enough that seeing a black and red tatooed bunch of scary Force-users in Zarza’s memories would ring a bell. Just to be clear, I’ve assumed that there’s no public connection between the Empire and the Sith. Even though the New Republic now knows that the Emperor and Darth Vader were Sith, the Imperials probably never accepted that. Lydia has no idea, though she knows there are Imperial Force-users.   
  
**Sith 2: Night of the Were-Sith**   
  
The particular form of haunting/possession seen in the nichitelakosti was inspired by Exar Kun’s ghost in the Jedi Academy trilogy. He was able to control Sith-mutated animals (battle hydras in particular -- [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_hydra](http://%5B/FONT)) and also at least temporarily could do the same with people. The way that the Sith ghosts were originally bound to the wreckage of their ship echoes the method that Kun used to hang around after death; he was pretty strongly bound to the Sith temples on Yavin 4. This was the result of a Sith who had time to plan and prepare, and most other Sith hauntings also occurred in tombs and ruins that were presumably made for that purpose (much of the planet of [Korriban ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Korriban)was a Sith version of the [ Valley of the ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Kings)[Kings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Kings), housing notable Sith and their grumpy spirits long after death.)   
  
The fact that these ghosts were able to stick around at all is stretching things a little, but I’ve assumed that the deaths of the ship’s crew would have provided a final energy boost which the most advanced Dark Side users among them drew from in a similar way to how Kun drained the Massassi to achieve his own immortality. The ship was not as good as a traditional Sith funerary building for preserving ghosts, but it was still emotionally tied to them in a way that was just close enough to work. From the lack of big power displays – aside from the attempts to possess Lydia and Inahki (the Zeltron hybrid) – it’s probably already clear that these spirits are not quite the powerhouses that Exar Kun’s ghost was. They weren’t quite that powerful in life, either; these Sith were reasonably tough but not the top dogs of their era.   
  
As Zarza noticed, they are slowly blending into the minds of their hosts. If Sith ghosts could easily possess people or creatures without consequences, there would likely be a lot more of them wandering around. Palpatine managed it with his clones during the Dark Empire stories, but A) they were his clones and B) they kept dying of some sort of Dark Side-related sickness. Ending up with animal-like minds and greatly reduced Force abilities (they really can’t do telekinesis or other advanced manipulations) is the tradeoff these Sith have made for their escape from eternal ghostly boredom. ****  



	21. Junior Inquisitor to the Rescue? (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 11)

**41 AE, Month 1, Day 26 – Part 11**   


Lesedi cautiously stepped forward, her face tinted by a faint haze of night-visor green rather than the grayscale of Dris’s nocturnal vision. That tipped me off that this was actually happening and not a memory. The image must be from my own eyes. However, the way she _seemed_ was filtered by Zarza and Dris on the way. With that point of view in place, I hardly recognized her.    
  
What I was used to seeing was an Inquisitor. “Junior” or not, that title was not taken lightly back home. Even after the Nebula Command severed any official ties with them, nobody was careless of Inquisitors in the rare event that one dropped by. My brain had Lesedi neatly filed away in Inquisitor-land, with its accompanying list of survival tips. (Mind their personal space; remember that you’re clearing an area for them, their sense of importance, _and_ the cloak. This is especially true if it’s a younger one who just graduated to a new uniform. No panicking. No lying. Never, ever mention the Jedi – no matter how much you dislike or don’t care about them, you dislike or don’t care in the wrong way. Basically, the trick is to avoid the Inquisitor without obviously avoiding them and never draw their full attention. Become part of the furniture.)    
  
Zarza didn’t really understand the term “Inquisitor” and was amused by it. As far as she could tell, it was a strange label, like calling a person a “walker”, “breather”, or “eater” as a job title. To question – or rather, she decided after some digging, to torture an enemy for information – this was a basic skill in her world. Why place such importance on it? Good question, now that I think about it. We didn’t really talk much about the Inquisitors on Shullia. When they were around, everyone was terrified of them. When they weren’t, it was as though they didn’t exist. That may have been more so around me personally than in general. Close friends knew that my father had little interest in socializing with his boring non-Force-sensitive daughter. Anyone else undoubtedly thought I would tattle to my parents if they said anything at all. So as little as most people knew about the organization, I probably knew even less.    
  
To Zarza, the proper name for the Junior Inquisitor’s status would have been Serketursai, or something like that. It sort of meant “student”, in the way that Zarza’s old title meant “Lord” for lack of a better word. Like everything else about the Sith, it was confusing to me; a Serketursai was an… auditioning student, maybe. One who had a certain level of ability and training, but was not yet under the charge of a high-ranking Sith. It wasn’t an insult, but it hinted that the bearer had a lot to prove. Lesedi was a Force-sensitive and so everything she did was evaluated as though she were a Sith. She wasn’t a Jedi and that was the only other category Zarza cared about for such people – there was something kind of interesting there, actually, though I only caught a little of it.    
  
Zarza had occasionally met Force-sensitives that did not come from Sith or Jedi training and seemed to regard them as larval, flawed versions of her own people. I have to admit I was shocked by this because with the Inquisitors I think it tends to be almost the opposite. Unaffiliated Force-sensitives are The Enemy until and unless they prove otherwise, or so I gathered from my own experience of being mistakenly pegged as one. There was some peculiar strain between my parents until they discovered that it was just an error in Isander’s sensing. It was enough that even with my tired and bleary state after the fungus issues of that year, I still picked up that Mum and I were being blamed for something terrible. I’ve wondered since then whether my father thought Mum had faked my birth Force-testing results or something. It’s supposed to be impossible and she never would have done so. Seriously. My COMPNOR-trained, former ISB agent Mum, of all people.   
  
Having a ghost in my head was scary at the time, yet now I’m fascinated at what I can remember. The things that old Sith could see! Incredible. Even when limited to human senses, she got more out of them than my best efforts have ever managed. The tiniest details of movement, facial expression, and Force presence held a wealth of knowledge for Zarza, just as the smell of a tree trunk could tell Dris volumes about what had passed through the forest recently.    
  
The sudden eddies and spikes in the Force energy that flowed around Lesedi reminded Zarza of the Sith combat form Raltkidra. She had preferred that form. Originally, it was used with a retractable-tipped spear. Zarza had adapted it when she acquired a lightsaber (which would be when she swiped one off of a Jedi’s corpse – the Sith didn’t have that technology to start with, but looted any useful weapons from their enemies when they could.) She used the swift activation and deactivation of the blade to distract her opponents. Pretty impressive. Nothing that I would ever want to try at home. It demanded that you commit to each move with a terrifying level of certainty. You had to have absolute confidence that you would be in the right place at the right time, but also that the other combatant would not somehow throw you off. How did anyone invent that kind of fighting _and_ live to pass it on? No wonder the Sith went extinct. It gives me chills to even think about trying some of those stunts.   
  
That brief pause towards the outer edge of Zarza/Dris’s farthest possible reach, that was a reaction to Dris’s appearance. There was just the vaguest whiff of fear in Lesedi’s scent. The pose was also close to a Jedi style that Zarza knew by sight. That was not a good association. Apparently the Sith shared at least one thing with the Inquisitors I’ve known: they really hated Jedi. A lot.   
  
And that way of choosing her steps so as to mingle with the shadows, even as the hobble in her walk spoiled the illusion… was interesting. It reminded Zarza of Shawen, a form that was used by Sith assassins. If skilled enough, the user could become more or less invisible. Zarza was not trained in this type of movement, since it was rare knowledge and carefully guarded by the few experts. She suspected Lesedi was several teachers removed from whoever had actually been a specialist.    
  
To me, that would all seem to point to a broad education. To Zarza, it was evidence of a lack of social standing. The fact that there was a combination of forms wasn’t bad – in fact, there was kind of an expectation that Lesedi should be putting together a style of her own from multiple sources. However, by this age, she thought that a Force-user should have a thorough grounding in at least one specific form. There was something missing in her Force presence as well – and this is another thing that she thought of with words that simply made no sense whatsoever in Basic. Blah blah, and therefore, obviously… nothing I could understand. All I can say is that Zarza had a general sense of “Whatever, I could totally take ‘em. Blindfolded and without the help of opposable thumbs. Bring it on.”   
  
Her gut reaction was that someone had left Lesedi’s training unfinished, whether intentionally or by meeting an untimely end. That no one had quickly stepped in to provide for her further training was evidence that she was not considered to be a rising star. Nevertheless, Zarza kept a wary eye on the young Inquisitor and scanned her Force presence for any sign of an impending attack as Dris rose from her curled-up position to face the newcomer on all fours.    
  
By the time Zarza realized her mistake, we were both suffering for it. The resting physical state of both myself and the nichitelakosti nearby had stabilized things more than either of us realized. Movement did not work so well. The view went from one image to a weird, split combination of me on the ground with Zarza/Dris attempting to stand up and move towards Lesedi.    
  
As Zarza struggled to maintain control, I began to get my sense of sound and touch back. Both of our senses, actually. Here’s a recipe for terrible vertigo: try to deal with the input from two sets of ears, one of them non-human and highly sensitive, while also seeing from two places at once. Stir in the protests of two different species’ bodies. Dris might be durable, but she was also older than a mythosaur’s petrified teeth and not in great shape to go from lying on the cold ground to standing at full speed.    
  
I responded to her complaining joints by curling inward in a less than stoic manner and saying some less than stoic words. The unpleasant feeling of lingering caffeine on an empty stomach and the pain in my head had subsided somewhat. Unfortunately, the more I was out Zarza and Dris’s head the more it seemed that my own was not functioning very well. Everything felt out of sync, out of time like I was still living in Zarza’s scattered memories. The closing of my fist reminded me that the droid I had tried to use as a weapon was still in my hand. The sharp bits were cutting into my palm and fingers. The fact that the pain seemed distant and vague compared to Zarza/Dris’s arthritis was not good.   
  
Another not-so-good thing was that, on closer inspection, it appeared the droid was stabbing at me with a hypo. From the way I felt, it was probably some kind of energy or nutrient shot. Too late to worry anyway. At least the lack of an instant horrible reaction hinted that it wasn’t one of those nutrient boosters that contain arrowleaf kibi extract. That devil weed is my allergenic nemesis.    
  
I tried to shift my grasp so that I could brush the droid away. My fingers weren’t working very well and it was distracting. It startled me pretty badly when the Junior Inquisitor leaned over and took the droid from my hands. Even though I had seen her moving towards Zarza and I, somehow I had not expected her to be that close yet. She didn’t look at me at all, focusing her gaze only on the nichitelakosti-Sith female who stood nearby. However, she laid her hand on my shoulder briefly. There must have been some kind of Force-based warmth transfer, because I instantly hurt way more than before and rolled over shivering. In my befuddled state, I thought it was some kind of punishment. Later, of course, I understood – hypothermia treatment. Refrigerated Lydia was not the brightest glowrod in the box.   
  
Though I couldn’t really afford the time, I put my head down against the ground and breathed in deeply. The world did not completely stop spinning, but it improved a little. The disconnect between me and Zarza-and-Dris seemed to be growing. A pins-and-needles feeling ran through my body, as though everything had fallen asleep while I was “out” and was just getting back to normal. The intense hearing of Dris’s lynx-like ears faded away to the point that I could no longer pick up the soft tread of Lesedi’s boots. Miraculously, I could actually focus my eyes even if my head still felt stuffed with equal parts cotton and cactus.    
  
Okay, sleepy. Time to get up. Zain would have had my lungs out for being that slow. Well, that’s kind of harsh. He’s family, so he might have settled for a kidney. Keeping in mind the nichitelakosti’s reactions to my movements before, I stayed low to the ground and struggled into a crouching position as smoothly as I could. Coordination was not coming easily.    
  
The shadows of the rest of the creatures still lined the edge of the clearing, watching curiously. I could hear them talking, the high warbles and low-pitched rumbles blending together. They were worried. My trip into the secret world of Sith creatures did not give me the exact meaning, but much of Zarza/Dris’s recent life included memories of hunting. The giggly sounds were actually both social cues and warnings that were used to communicate when attacking unpredictable prey. They were like painted targets, since the creatures could direct their calls towards the object of their attention. For a lone hunter, it just served to summon help. If there was already a gathered hunting party around the target, the combined cries of several nichitelakosti allowed everyone in the area to triangulate the exact location of the thing in question. Basically, I had a bunch of haunted boar-wolves saying “hey, here she is” every time I made a move.    
  
It went against the grain for the nichitelakosti to allow Lesedi to approach when their leaders were seemingly helpless. Only the authority of the two big guys, whom Zarza had identified as the hosts of Sith named Tadi and Kashar, kept them from running in to take down the intruder. The younger ones trembled with nervous energy.    
  
I thought of trying to ease my way over to where I could get at the blaster again, but feared making a tense situation worse. Zarza/Dris had drawn up to display her full height as Lesedi came closer, and I could feel the reverberations of her growls. The chipped remnants of her spinal armor stood up along with the fur on her neck. Her tail swished up in a high arc and came down swiftly, the spikes making an impressive rattle-snap sound as it leveled off without connecting against anything. That was a warning signal, I remembered. It was one that Zarza would probably regret if she survived this confrontation, since she spent much of her spare time soaking in mud to ease the pain that hunting and posturing caused.    
  
Hydrospanner seemed to be keeping a particular watch on me and kept shifting around as though she wanted to sprint in and start breaking skulls. She was purely animal as far as Zarza/Dris remembered. No spectral hitchhikers. Of course, that might not be reliable information. A half-credit and the accuracy of the nichitelakosti’s recall wouldn’t buy a pack of gum most places.   
  
There was still some sliver of a connection that Zarza’s emotions poured through, even though the direct insight had faded away. Surprise, surprise, she was in a foul mood. The smell of nichitelakosti blood on Lesedi’s clothing (Dris noticed this instantly and it went straight through the link to me like a lightning flash) was not helping things. I’m still not sure how to explain the intense anger that Zarza/Dris was capable of feeling – I’ve been plenty hacked off in my life, but her temper was another thing altogether. She seemed to practice rage on a different plane, much like Dris practiced the art of reading scents in a way that no limited human nose could replicate. Harming her pack was not the way to make a good impression. Neither Dris nor Zarza tolerated _other people messing with her stuff_. (This was very inconvenient for me when my brain was seen as “her stuff.” Alpha-dog omnivores and Sith may get along fine, but they make crummy roommates for anyone else.)    
  
Zarza/Dris was a split second from lunging forward to attack the Inquisitor. One wrong move would be all it took. Everything seemed to be moving so fast compared to me. The more I warmed up, the more slowed-down, confused and injured I felt.    
  
_Wait_ , said the afternoons spent with Ahnjai learning when to move the fight and when to let it rest until the right time. _Watch_ , said the nights my mother took me out people-watching in the city. _Well, do you trust this Inquisitor?_ asked the mornings when I was hauled out of bed before sunrise and sent off with Zain into the forest. Trust was something he often asked, always with a gleam of mischief in his eye and usually before sending me into a fire-ant hill or quicksand bog as an educational experience. I had learned that yes, I could trust him. To get me into a terrible mess and to show me how to claw my way out. _Better be ready to scram_ , said every long day spent barreling through the marsh with Isander on my heels. If there was one thing my deplorable pest of a cousin (actually my nephew, but with him being younger by two years that just sounds odd) had shown me, it was to never trust any person able to throw Shullian fire hornets without using a net.    
  
Lesedi had no obligations to me; as an Inquisitor she was outside the regular system. Her only responsibilities were to higher ranks. However, that actually meant that I _could_ trust her…to take care of herself. If she wasn’t telling me what to do, then she already had something in mind. Hopefully not by the “Force-throw human chew toy as distraction” technique, since I wasn’t up to running a marathon in the woods.    
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
Regarding how Zarza doesn’t recognize “Inquisitor” as a Sith thing, this is because of the era in which she lived. The Galactic Empire’s Inquisitors were likely named after those of the earlier Sith Empire (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_Inquisitor>). These first Inquisitors seem to have come into being some time after the Great Hyperspace War, so they were well after her time.    
  
The Serketursai are about the same as the Sith Tyros of the Lost Tribe, just with a different name that became outdated among the Sith on Kesh. (<http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_Tyro>)   
  
Coming up with some possible Sith combat styles was an interesting challenge. There is a lot of fascinating detail on the Jedi forms, but the Sith are less described. It might be more accurate to canon to say that they have no forms of their own, just adopting those of the Jedi. But what fun would that be? So I made up a couple, drawing on the idea that the Sith might have created some forms based on their differences from the Jedi.    
  
Raltkidra is probably a relative of Dun Möch ([http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dun_Möch](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dun_M%C3%B6ch)), with less emphasis on verbal attacks and more on unnerving one’s enemies with reckless physical stunts.    
  
Shawen takes full advantage of the Dark Side’s strength in the area of deception, using the manipulation of minds and the external world while also drawing in information to guide the user’s own movements. The human (or human-like alien) sensory system is capable of missing some really obvious things. It seems to me like the Sith would probably have found a way to capitalize on this. 


	22. Eye-Crusties and Other Sith Problems (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 12 )

****41 AE,** **Month 1, Day 26 –** Part 12  **   
  
Lesedi paused in front of Dris and knelt down with about as much dignity as anyone moving with a leg injury in the dark could manage. It made me nervous just to watch, but it seemed that she knew what she was doing. This was how Sith showed their respect to the higher ranks. Lesedi even had her hands arranged the proper way. She kept her lightsaber but brought the end that would project the blade to rest against the ground.    
  
The Sith in Zarza’s memories never seemed to forget that every encounter with another could be deadly. Even outside of wartime, the way they carried themselves around their peers was all about walking on the blade’s edge. To avoid constant brawling, they had to show that they were neither challengers nor easy pickings.    
  
Zarza/Dris’s bafflement was almost comical, coming from well over four metric tons of warbeast. I wouldn’t have thought the nichitelakosti’s head could turn that far sideways. She circled around the young Inquisitor at just beyond arm’s length, moving with exaggerated care. The humming sound that the creatures made increased again (hello, unease and nausea), and the guards Tadi and Kashar edged in from off to the right. They stopped several meters away when Zarza growled.    
  
The Sith-creature investigated. I tried to envision the wheels that would be turning behind those glowing eyes, weighing the Inquisitor’s behavior. Was this human knowingly using Sith mannerisms, and if so should Zarza deal with her as one? Was she ill, venomous, or defenseless and bluffing? Or, might she be infected with a neurological parasite that would be passed on to the next careless diner up the food chain?    
  
Dris had a simple preliminary test for dealing with such questions: stand back and poke the thing with her tail spines until something interesting happened. (That was most likely the reason why her tail was messed up. Something interesting happened one time.) Lesedi was unnervingly patient with the nudging, and I began to wonder what it would take to actually anger her. On the fourth try, Dris’s tail didn’t connect at all. It was as though it bounced off some sort of invisible shield. There was the telekinesis, then. However, the Junior Inquisitor still didn’t go on the attack. Strange, I thought. Lesedi remained still and almost unflinching as the nichitelakosti nosed at the back of her neck.    
  
One side effect of this awkward confrontation was that the pack was captivated by the interaction between Zarza/Dris and Lesedi. Even the over-eager nichitelakosti Hydrospanner was hovering anxiously over every move of Lesedi’s – and not mine. For the first time, I was able to move unnoticed. The blaster that I had swiped from Arik was nearly out of charge, but at least now I was allowed to find and conceal it again. I really hoped that I was right and Lesedi knew what she was doing. With her at close quarters to Dris, there was little chance that I could hit the nichitelakosti fast enough – not to mention effectively enough – to prevent a grisly scene.    
  
Dris’s silver-streaked ears swiveled as she listened to whatever comments the other creatures were making. The bone plating over her face made her expression difficult to read; the nichitelakosti had little of that at any rate. Body language and voice, and a touch of what I now knew to be the Force, filled in for the facial muscles that her bone plates covered and immobilized.    
  
A Sith might execute even a “polite” visitor if there was a practical reason for it. But I wasn’t sure if this was still how Zarza operated. She had been living in symbiosis with Dris for longer than she had ever  been  a Sith. As long as Lesedi was seen as a fellow predator rather than prey, she would have a chance. The warbeasts might fight among themselves like demons, but once someone rolled over and exposed the vulnerable armor-less areas of their neck or belly the fight was  _ usually _ over. They’d tear each other to pieces too often otherwise.    
  
Zarza looked at Lesedi and said something to her. I couldn’t understand it. The language that she and Qalydon had spoken to me was fading away like the logic of a dream. A few words remained, but that was all. The only thing I caught was “ _ Tsiss _ ” – Sith. To my amazement, Lesedi answered in what sounded like the same tongue. She had an accent. Too soft on certain consonants, and just a bit off the normal rhythm of Sith conversation. Familiar but not fluent. Much like Zarza’s use of Basic, actually. The nichitelakosti huffed and stared at me pointedly as though she had picked up that thought. She turned away with the flat ears of total dismissal.    
  
Whatever they were discussing, it was obviously important. It was surreal watching them – a monster out of legend next to an apprentice Inquisitor barely older than myself. The two of them almost seemed to be sharing secrets, with their heads leaned together like gossiping teenagers. It was hard to even try to follow Lesedi’s end of the conversation; she was inches away from the Sith-creature’s face so that the grey fog of Dris’s breath veiled them both. The Inquisitor gestured back towards the fallen bodies of Qalydon and Inahki.   
  
Everything else had distracted me from even checking what was going on over there. It was not good. Instead of them repeating what had happened when Zarza plunked herself into my mind, there seemed to have been some kind of accident.    
  
Shadows that looked like water-light reflections moved across the ground between the two beings, gathering around the torso and head area of each one. The nichitelakosti host body of Qalydon lay crumpled and motionless. Inahki’s skull was radiating flashes of light from within – I could see the outlines of his bones when it was particularly bright.    
  
Something else was in there, also. Cybernetics or other artificial items, based on the edges and connecting lines. Perhaps it was some kind of plate like they had to use to put Vera’s head back together after her speeder crash. She got rid of hers later when the doctors were able to replace it with osteo-coral structures, but maybe this spacer didn’t have the credits for that kind of treatment.    
  
Anyway, it didn’t seem to be doing Inahki any good at the moment. He didn’t stir at all with the painful-looking flares, but his breathing was very shallow. In fact, I thought he had died until I spotted a whisp of frost mingled in with the shadows that flowed from his mouth.    
  
Zarza surveyed the mess and sighed heavily.    
  
“Not again,” I murmured, the habits of Zarza’s mind slipping out before I realized it. She’d given it a fair try with me, but none of them could hold the possession effect for long. Unfortunately for Qalydon, he was not even as skilled in that area as Zarza. Too distracted by his desperation to find a way out, she believed. Things tended to go wrong for him. Though Zarza had done her best to take over my mind, when she met with resistance – and later the distraction of Lesedi’s arrival – she was able to let go. That was not one of Qalydon’s strong points.    
  
Having Zarza, Lesedi, and I nearby was bad, too. There were images and emotions left in my mind about this, unclear but at least a little informative. Too many beings in one area created “noise” and problems for the body-hopping ghost. Wandering spirits and Sith creatures were the worst; other beings like me were unwelcome but not as distracting. The nichitelakosti had probably tried to hold everyone back from the scene of the attempted possession because of past errors like this. Zarza had only approached this closely because I made threatening moves towards Qalydon.    
  
As long as we weren’t deemed too dangerous, that was. It was not hard to see that Zarza/Dris was adding up the tally for just that kind of judgment. The broken-tusked creature knew at a glance that I had the blaster. She gave me a piercing glare. The Sith must be used to spotting opponents with concealed weapons, even after all this time. She stared at Lesedi again, searching her eyes for some sign. For a second, I thought there was a spark in Lesedi of that odd light that Inquisitor Ombyrne’s eyes glowed with when he was angry. Zarza’s pack and the Sith they hosted had that too. They had no name for it. It was just something that happened, like eye-crusties after sleep.    
  
The Junior Inquisitor nodded towards Zarza and then slowly walked towards the supernatural traffic accident in the clearing. Glancing over her shoulder at me, she called, “Remove the power pack and drop it, Shelvay. We have an arrangement with the Sith Lord now.”   
  
There was a murmur from the creatures on the outside and I felt their attention pass over me briefly, like waves in a pool of water.   
  
A dinner arrangement? Well, I wasn’t going to argue with an Inquisitor in the woods. It would be bad for my health. I stripped out the power pack and dropped the blaster. My fingers were working better now, though the returning sensations remained a bit painful. It was better not to even think about my feet. Pain is better than total frostbite, I reminded myself.   
  
Lesedi crouched beside Inahki’s prone body. If she was disturbed by the shadows, then the reaction was very controlled. She set the prickly little mantis-droid on his mussed hair and brought out a scanner/datapad unit. It was of some specialized make that I did not recognize, and its holographic display of moving lines and symbols was too small to read from a distance.    
  
Zarza returned to stand guard over me.    
  
The Junior Inquisitor picked up the hybrid’s hand, taking off the remains of his clawed glove and checking for a pulse. She prodded at the container that Inahki had electrified earlier, as though she could sense that something odd had been done with it. After that, she remained with her hand on Inahki’s forehead, fiddling with some information on the display and occasionally poking at the droid.   
  
Meanwhile, my nichitelakosti keeper eyed the weapon parts on the ground and coiled her twisted, spiny tail around my ankles as though I might still have plans to run. Smart Sith-creature.    
  
Warm Sith-creature. Her smelly, ravenous presence at my back was alarming, but it warded off the chill.   
  
“Are you  _ cuddling _ ?”    
  
“Chilled.” I knew Zarza could understand me, but she looked almost as bewildered as she had been by Lesedi’s display of Sithly etiquette.    
  
Then she laughed. It was Dris’s laugh, a chirping sound that was nothing at all like the eerily Human-sounding hunting calls or the deep thundering rumbles of nichitelakosti speech. Actually, it was more like the noise made by a squeaky balloon; it seemed entirely out of place coming from Dris’s massive jaws.    
  
“If you sleep and drool on my fur, I will eat you.”    
  
“Yes, ma’am, err, Lord Zarza.” I choked back my questioning as to why she should care about drool, of all things. Her delivery of the threat reminded me so strongly of the terrifying Xema Suraval that my gut reflexes anticipated poor marks on my student record as well as toothmarks on my bones. At least I didn’t accidentally call Zarza “Mum.” That would be worse. The License Testing Officer who had worked with my year on vehicle driving skills had not signed up for that, and I think it nearly gave the strict teacher a cardiac event.   
  
“You are fortunate that the young Serketursai believes your alterations are of some interest. It would be a shame for you if there were no reason to preserve you as exchange for Qalydon.”   
  
Lovely. I was the collateral? Lesedi didn’t care  _ that _ much. Hopefully she could restore Qalydon quickly, before Zarza/Dris’s not very considerable patience ran out.   
  
“What is changed about me?” I asked Zarza, trying not to look too directly into her eyes. Not only was that considered rude – even more so than with humans – but it had aided in activating her control powers before.   
  
She nipped at my arm, seemingly to remind me who was boss.   
  
“Too curious for a low-ranking Zuguruk, grey herdling. Someone has used our techniques on you. That alters scents.” (This was such a disturbing answer that I’ve chosen to regard it as a cruel joke, though I did dutifully report it to Lesedi since she wanted to know everything the Sith said. Lesedi does not put much faith in Zarza’s judgment. I am relieved by that fact.) The nichitelakosti considered the conversation over at this point and went back to her observation of Lesedi’s work on the two strange patients in the field.    
  
The Inquisitor had moved from Inahki to Qalydon’s side. She brushed at the moving shadows with her hand as though to clear them away, then halted with her palm up for a moment. The small droid rested inside her hand, its lights flickering in a slow, regular pattern. Then she entered something into her scanner/datapad machine and went back to Inahki. She placed her hand at his temple and drew it back. Misty shadow matter came with it and the Zeltron hybrid drew in a visible breath and began to cough. More of the mist stuff flowed out and away, swirling towards Qalydon’s body. The nichitelakosti began to twitch, four misshapen paws moving aimlessly. Chasing runyips, or was it still Jedi after all these years?    
  
Inahki sat up abruptly as though waking from a bad dream. His hands immediately went to his ribcage and he doubled over in obvious pain. The Inquisitor caught him by the shoulders and guided him back to lying down. The alien tensed and flinched away. He brought up one faintly sparking hand, the gloved one if I remember correctly. Lesedi caught it easily in a steady hold. Using her other hand, she keyed in something on the scanner/datapad and said something to the droid that I did not catch.   
  
For a moment, the holographic display flared up with a series of symbols, lines, and bright colors that moved faster than my eyes could see. Without warning, it blinked out as fast as it had activated. Inahki likewise went blank, falling back into unconsciousness. Lesedi grabbed him around the skull, with no carefulness this time. She snapped some order, which was apparently ignored.    
  
“ _ KARK IT _ ,” she yelled, loudly enough that even I could hear. The Inquisitor hovered between him and the machines as she prodded at both. Her lips moved in what might have been technojargon or swearing; it was hard to tell. The droid’s lights were in a flurry.    
  
All the efforts were in vain. Lesedi’s shoulders slumped briefly, and I saw her actually strike the ground with her fist. Then, all business, she picked up the unconscious Zeltron hybrid in a rescue worker’s carry – telekinesis must have done a lot of the lifting, but the hitch in her walk became worse with the added weight nevertheless. She stormed towards Zarza/Dris and I.    
  
Zarza said something in Sith; it sounded like a rebuke from the tone of voice. Lesedi stiffly bowed in apology, then gave Zarza a brief explanation of something to do with Qalydon – I caught his name in the spiel. The Inquisitor’s face was drawn and she looked worried as well as frustrated. After a tense moment of negotiations, Lesedi clamped a hand on my shoulder and Zarza/Dris stood back and let us go. The pack of creatures seemed to exhale in unison. Disappointed to see us leave in one piece, no doubt.   
  
We moved through the forest as quickly as we could manage. I did my best to help with Inahki’s transportation, but both Lesedi and I were struggling to keep our balance when her transport came in view. Thankfully, the speeder was in one piece and large enough to carry all three passengers at a stretch.    
  
Then, of course, help arrived and things briefly went to all the hells at once.   
  
  
  
** Notes ** :   
  
The osteo-coral Lydia mentions was something unrealistic that I made up because it sounded cool. As it turns out, there’s a real-world equivalent already out there. I had almost thrown the idea out on the basis of the medical tech being so heavily cybernetics/bacta dependent. Coral sounded more in line with the Yuuzhan Vong. (The most fascinating part to me is that apparently the person’s own human bone material will eventually grow into the coral substitute and  _ replace most of it _ .) ( [ http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/02/health/doctors-trying-coral-for-skeletal-repairs.html ](http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/02/health/doctors-trying-coral-for-skeletal-repairs.html) )   
  
Dris’s laughter sounds like a guinea pig, because guinea pigs make the most bizarre noises. They sound just like fluffy little feathered dinosaurs that are about to swarm you.    
  
The Zuguruk ( [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zuguruk ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zuguruk) ) were the engineer class of the ancient Sith, and the closest word Zarza found to match to Lydia’s specialty.


	23. Clawing Your Way up the Food Chain (Month 1, Day 26 – Part 13)

****41 AE,** **Month 1, Day 26 –** Part 13 **   
  
The soft hum of sound-dampened repulsorlifts made me look up and nearly stumble as Lesedi and I slogged along with the unconscious Zeltron hybrid. It was a noise that I had been taught to recognize when I was very small. People didn’t compromise the functioning of their vehicles for that much quiet unless they were up to something. Tensing at the possibility of more outlaws like Dzidra and Inahki’s crew, I glanced at Lesedi. She had heard the sound as well. The defensive set of her shoulders let me know she was not thrilled to see the large hovercraft that loomed out of the shadows on our right, but she told me to stay put while she went to meet the newcomers.   
  
We lowered Inahki to the ground and I remained there to keep watch over him. Though he was breathing about as well as his ribs allowed, there was something very off about the utter blankness of his face. Prickly did not like the looks of it either. The droid supervised us, sitting on the hybrid’s body and jabbering unhappy nonsense in Binary. It had recovered full movement with Lesedi’s moments of tinkering, but still sounded off-kilter.   
  
The people who came pouring out of the hovercraft were Imperials. I might have guessed that by their bearing even without the uniforms. They looked like some kind of security force, wearing uniforms of an indistinct dark color. Some of them took Inahki away on a stretcher, while one remained to shepherd me towards the hovercraft. That one ushered me along, most of her attention on the forest around us and keeping her blaster close to hand.   
  
Bringing up the rear of the group was a handful of beings in robes. The design was some variation on Inquisitors’ garb, similar to the formal cloak and nauga leather ensemble that Ombyrne wore. As if thinking of him had called up the sorcerous sourpuss, I heard his voice drifting above the quiet rustling and conversation of the group.   
  
“—Here, sniffing around. For all the nuisance, it would be easier to render them into glue. Disgusting vermin.” He walked more noisily than the rest, ignoring his fellow shadows’ attempts to hush him. Ombyrne switched his glowrod to a high-lume setting and shone it over the activity as everyone was bustling towards the hovercraft. As his eyes swept over Inahki’s stretcher and me in my mud-soaked state, he made a wordless grunt of disgust. I didn’t want to guess what it was for, though I remembered with a miserable twist that the _Draigon_ was still damaged and I had left without permission – also, the breathmask and night-visor were still glued on my face. (Never, ever again. The only reason I could stand that was because I had so many other complaints to worry about.) Lesedi, who had gone straight to the gathered Inquisitors, murmured something to him. He did not reply, but glared furiously out into the woods.   
  
Then he spun abruptly and aimed the high-lume beam at a particular point in the shadows. A piercing, wavery scream rang out – nichitelakosti, not human. The bright light directly in its eyes must have startled it. Before the creature could duck out of view entirely, Ombyrne drew himself up and swept his arm out in a sharp gesture. I swerved sideways before realizing the attack was not meant for me.   
  
(That was a reflex that I had learned years ago when Isander was mastering telekinesis. My little cousin was not a prodigy at the power, which was just as well because he had great enthusiasm for dealing out invisible blows that were equal to a rather vicious slap.)   
  
A tree branch snapped and crashed against something large. The nichitelakosti who had been the target let out another pained sound, followed by a deep, sepulchral growl of the sort I had learned meant trouble.   
  
Within seconds, I heard the stereo rumbling of an encroaching pack of nichitelakosti. The Imperial group responded quickly, steeling themselves against the unpleasant effects of the creature’s sounds with what looked like practiced resignation. They searched methodically for signs of movement, the most heavily armed – excluding the Inquisitors, who had taken charge of the stretcher and were occupied with whisking that away into the hovercraft – taking up positions on the outer edge.   
  
The nichitelakosti’s huge padded feet were deceptively quiet for the mass of the creatures. I knew it was coming, but still felt a thrill of fear when the first wave came hurtling towards us. They were synchronized in their approach: one took the lead and charged in towards us, drawing the blaster fire and shielding several companions who followed in an arrowhead-like formation.   
  
The Imperial who had been guiding me briskly to the hovercraft saw the attack taking shape as soon as I did. She clearly knew these creatures and had no illusions that the first volleys of plasma would penetrate their natural shielding.   
  
“Roll under.” The drop was no surprise, since this was no sparring match and she’d warned me. I curled and rolled, managing to at least direct most of the fall.   
  
More shots were added to the chorus of blasters as the woman began firing the instant I was out of her way.   
  
Under the hovercraft, even muffled repulsorlifts were a constant humming pressure in my skull. This was the only cover against the creatures since the entrance area was now crowded with the small crowd of Imperials piling into the machine. I’d need to get up there as soon as there was a good chance. This craft was not an interstellar behemoth that would destroy me in its afterburners, but being here when it zoomed away would not do my body any good.   
  
The chaotic jumble of fighting people and creatures was thick around the machine at first, but soon moved to the side a bit. It was as good of an opportunity as could be expected. I crawled forward.   
  
Jaws snapped shut with an almost metallic crunch.   
  
I don’t remember tumbling back under shelter to miss the nichitelakosti’s lunge. It must have happened, because I wasn’t dead.   
  
A now all-too-familiar face adorned with the beginnings of adult tusks peered at me, trying to squeeze through the gap and managing better than it should. The sharp edges of tusks and armor jarred against the metal of the hovercraft with a horrible grating sound. Instinct froze me in place – stupid primal instincts that were certain she would give up if my impression of an inanimate object were good enough.   
  
But Hydrospanner wasn’t impressed with my act. She had a new hole torn in her right ear and was panting as though winded. The young nichitelakosti must have slipped away from the main battle. The ear-splitting cacophony still came from somewhere nearby.   
  
She swept the spiked end of her tail under the hovercraft. As she’d intended, that flushed me out of hiding and I scrambled out by the edge opposite to the creature. Her body hunched into a crouch – and I broke into a staggering run, knowing that she would spring across the barrier and capture me long before any cover but having no other way to turn.   
  
There was another metal-scraping sound behind me and an unhappy snarl followed by clattering and sounds of impact that I didn’t dare turn around to look at. Something glanced off my bad shoulder – it felt like a crowbar – and I tumbled over. That something coiled around my middle, but I was able to slither out of it. Up on my feet again, just barely, I could see Hydrospanner thrashing about frantically with something sinuously draped over her tail, head, and forelegs.   
  
The lines glinted and for a split second my only thought was “snake”, but then the hovercraft swayed in response to her pulling and I understood what was happening. Hydrospanner had gotten herself caught on the anchoring cables, powerful cords used to tether the vehicle in high and windy places.   
  
Her dismayed roar sounded and felt like an earthquake at such close quarters. I clenched my hands over my ears and curled inward. The ground seemed to lurch underfoot.   
  
Hydrospanner made an alarmed cackling noise and toppled heavily on her side. The end of the metal cord went with her; the pilot inside the hovercraft must have noticed the nichitelakosti’s weight was tugging the craft around and released the cable.   
  
She lurched forward and I lurched back, and it may have been just my bad luck rather than her determination that got the nichitelakosti’s lashing tail – complete with entangled cable – wrapped around my calf. Needless to say, we went to the ground in a bloodied, snarling heap.   
  
I don’t think Hydrospanner was the only one spitting and making terrible noises at that point. In fact, I think my vocabulary had dropped down to a particular forbidden word – one of those “K”-word plus ten things that give people pause when they realize you so much as know the word. As if from a distance, I saw that I kept grabbing at the cable and using it to push away the spiny tail, or smacking it against the nichitelakosti’s head. Her tusks became further twisted in the line and this kept her from coming around to bite me, but the cord was also trapping me against her flank.   
  
Light flared and I flinched and blinked, trying to keep a hold of the cable that was slipping through my fingers. There were voices. People.   
  
Someone was unlooping the cables that had gotten wrapped around me. Still in fight-or-flight mode, I nearly clawed the being’s face before recognizing that it was A) help, and also B) Zelenus. He was wearing a night-visor and held a glowrod in one hand.   
  
The nichitelakosti rumbled angrily and I looked up to see Bramer scrabbling at the cables that bound her tusks in an attempt to hold her until we could get clear. Hydrospanner let out an ear-grinding bellow. Her body jack-knifed as she bent nearly in half trying to get at the threat. Bramer lost his grip on the line and got side-swiped by her razored shoulder armor while evading the Sith-creature’s attempt to roll and crush him.   
  
Zelenus propped me rather optimistically against a tree – as though I’d stay upright – and went to extract Bramer from the fight. This immediately got messy with Hydrospanner’s speed and ferocity in the mix, and I could only pick out a confusing barrage of sounds and moving bodies.   
  
The nichitelakosti’s lethal tail snapped out of its encircling cables with a rending scrape and whizzed past my face, striking the tree a meter above and sending a flurry of branches and wood chips down. Something going on where I couldn’t see distracted Hydrospanner and her tail went momentarily limp. I blundered forward, located what I thought was probably a pressure point for the appendage, kicked at it weakly, and knelt on it with as much body weight as I could apply. There was a dismal noise from the Sith-creature, though that may have been thanks to the two who were still trying to deal with the other sharp ends.   
  
I heard an unpleasant sound, the kind associated with very large animals and hairballs. The fire of the glowrod seared across my field of vision again and Zelenus and Bramer were grabbing me by the arms and dragging me along at top speed. My bad shoulder protested, and possibly I did as well. I can’t really say for sure.   
  
We were all knocked flat to the ground by a shockwave, and there was a horribly recognizable burning smell. I didn’t turn to look. Bramer and Zelenus did, and instantly regretted it.   
  
“Sithspit,” someone said, after the sacrifices of stomach contents had been performed. Well, that’s probably what they said. The noise of the blast had not been enough to totally blank out my hearing, but it certainly made things fuzzy.   
  
“That’s very nice of you, but I already have so much. The very finest Sith monster drool.” At least, I think I said something mortifying like that, though it probably got cut down to “gah niiice much mumble bluh” by whatever language of the concussed I was speaking.   
  
The three of us made our way back towards the hovercraft in an awkward six-legged shuffle, and discovered that the fighting had stopped. Completely. And someone had turned the lights on.   
  
“Oh.”   
  
“That’s… a targeting mark. Isn’t it.” Bramer was not asking us, just confirming that things could, in fact, possibly get even worse.   
  
We stared dumbfounded around us, blinking in the searing white glow that illuminated everything for miles around. The Star Destroyer casting the light would be the tiniest of shadows against the dark sky, but it was natural to look upwards and try to see anyway.   
  
Through the brilliance, I could see the ragged, gigantic forms of the nichitelakosti arrayed in a tense semicircle around the last figures standing before the hovercraft. My companions and I were allowed to pass without notice; all eyes were on the confrontation that had landed us in a capital ship’s sights.   
  
A cloaked man stood before Zarza, his posture angry and threatening and his hands – shaking. Clearly and obviously, even to my tired mind and nearly blinded vision. Ombyrne tilted his head back to look the nichitelakosti in the eye, and I could see that they did have the same shade now – that lurid, blood-tinged yellow that cut through even night-vision filters more than it should be able to do. He was flipping and catching a small comlink, and his expression made my blood run colder than it was already.   
  
I couldn’t interpret the conversation he was having with the Sith-creature, but it didn’t sound good from the tone of his voice and the occasional pauses where he was overcome with a breathy laughter that never rose above whisper pitch. Zarza was trying to look menacing and mostly succeeding, but I could see the nervous twitches starting. She also kept glancing at the larger nichitelakosti who sat nearby, flinching and shaking his head as though he had a flea in his ear. Qalydon was evidently up and around, but not recovered enough to bluster very well. The younger creatures were fidgeting and whining softly. Only the deadliest looks from Qalydon and Zarza quelled the noise.   
  
The Inquisitors were there too. Apparently, this had been interesting enough to draw them out into the cold. Lesedi was there. Her face was unusually readable for the moment: a study in cold rage. The others didn’t look especially happy to be there, either.   
  
It was pretty obvious that Ombyrne held the dead-man switch against our total annihilation in his hot little hands. And the little skrink was playing with it. I try not to think about that much, now that we’re out of that mess. Thinking about it might obligate me to try to kill an Inquisitor.   
  
Maybe the others mentally smacked him, or maybe he just recovered some dregs of the sense the stars gifted him. At any rate, he stopped tossing our doom in the air. He did, however, ignite his lightsaber and jab it towards Zarza’s face like it was an auxilary pointing finger of argument. Though nothing sticks out in my borrowed creature-memories, from that scene I got the strangest feeling that the two knew each other – and that there was a burning hatred between them. The earth rumbled a warning note and he grinned rapturously.   
  
Slowly, the nichitelakosti turned and plodded away into the forest. Every line of their bodies seemed to ooze resentment. Zarza turned and cast a last baleful look over her shoulder. Our eyes met, and I knew that she knew about the fight with Hydrospanner and the impulsive creature’s demise. She would have smelled it on us. We were on her list now.   
  
Ombyrne strutted to the hovercraft – it was that kind of walk men use when they are ridiculously pleased with themselves. The other Inquisitors followed with varied shades of relief and disgust on their faces.   
  
The rest of us began to breathe again. Several of the probably-security people came and collected the shambling creatures that had formerly been known as Lydia Shelvay, Xenon Bramer, and Tamir Zelenus.   
  
I ended up being loaded like a sack of gelatin into a seat between Bramer and the security woman who had hidden me under the hovercraft. Thankfully, there was a medic free and I was able to halfway doze in my seat as we were poked, prodded, and bacta-ed while the craft traveled. Real bacta. Strange luxury for such a remote place. The only downside to my mind was that they would not let me sleep and insisted on peeling the night-visor off my face with a solvent – not fun. I kept poking at the sensitive skin after it was removed. It seemed impossible that I was not actually dead. It’s still kind of hard to believe.   
  
  
  
**Notes** :   
  
Nauga leather comes from the nauga ( [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nauga ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nauga) ) – no, really. (I just love that SW has naugas. So they may use the “hyde” for something.)   



End file.
